Rebecca Louise Perlman

Rebecca was a 2017-18 Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, as well as a Dissertation Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. She studies international political economy with a focus on regulation, trade, and the role of international institutions. Rebecca is working on a book project that explores the origins of health and safety regulations. She develops a theory specifying the conditions under which firms are able to use health and safety regulations in order to block international competition. The theory produces the surprising conclusion that innovative firms benefit from and actively seek regulations that rule some of their own products unsafe. Rebecca has received funding from the Horowitz Foundation and Stanford’s Europe Center. She also received a Stanford Graduate Research Opportunity Grant. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her undergraduate degree is from Princeton University, where she majored in politics and graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa.