His research focuses primarily on economic geography, entrepreneurship, and social capital. He has studied for instance how venture capital, labor laws, and government research funding affect regional economic growth. He is currently engaged in studies of immigration and labor laws, regional variations in the supply of venture capital, social capital in early modern trade, returns to sustained brokerage in networks, and co-authorship networks of science. His work has been published in journals such as Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, and Research Policy. He obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University and, prior to NUS, he taught at Columbia University and Brock University.