Max Whitford

Publishes as Maximillian B. Whitford · University of Georgia · Free Systems Lab, Stanford GSB

About

Max Whitford (publishes as Maximillian B. Whitford) is a Master of Public Administration student at the University of Georgia (expected 2028) and a Research Fellow at the Free Systems Lab at Stanford GSB, where he works on AI governance. He holds a B.A. in Economics from UGA (2026, Phi Beta Kappa). His research sits at the intersection of nonmarket strategy, American political institutions, and law and economics. It asks two linked questions: how firms form beliefs about their regulatory environment and decide whether to comply, and how public institutions, constrained by their administrative capacity, form beliefs about firms and shape the legal environment in response. His empirical work uses state statutes, campaign finance and advertising data, and firm compliance behavior, with methods including text analysis, time-series econometrics, and difference-in-differences designs. His coauthors include David Mustard, Jamie Carson, and Andrew Whitford. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in business or economics.

Research

  1. Non-Monotonic Convergence of Policy Designs: Evidence from U.S. State-level Agritourism Statutes. Working paper Measures the content of every state statute governing commercial agritourism with a structural topic model and traces how regulatory designs diffuse over time. States converge toward an “optimal” design non-monotonically, a pattern consistent with learning in a multi-armed bandit or Callander’s (2011) model of search.
  2. Visibility by Design: Evidence from Security Breach Notification Laws in the United States, with Andrew Whitford. Working paper Uses text-as-data methods to show that (1) the allocation of visibility (when a public or private entity must disclose a breach) varies by state and entity type, and (2) statutes governing the public sector are consistently thinner than those governing private entities.
  3. The Marginal Ad in the Marginal District: Nonlinear Effects of Campaign Advertising, with Jamie Carson. Working paper Uses spectral clustering to build profiles of House candidates’ TV advertising strategies. In unfavorable districts, candidates who switch ads frequently perform better electorally than those who don’t; the same association does not appear in competitive districts.
  4. Strategic Compliance with State-Level Age Verification Laws for Adult Content, with David Mustard. Working paper Tracks whether ~6,200 live adult websites comply with state age-verification laws and models compliance as a function of site characteristics, including institutional sophistication and the type of content offered. Less-visible sites and sites offering extreme or abusive content are much less likely to comply.
  5. Estimating Executive-Legislative Bargaining Dynamics: Evidence from Vector Autoregression Models. Working paper Extends Hassell and Kernell (2016) with a vector autoregression to show that presidential influence over the legislative agenda increased substantially from 1985 to 2008.
  6. Money and Vulnerability: Electoral Shocks and the Endogeneity of Incumbent Spending in U.S. House Races, with Jamie Carson. Working paper Uses a staggered difference-in-differences design to estimate how electoral shocks shape incumbent spending in U.S. House races.
  7. The Transmission Problem: A Nationalization-Weighted Forecast for the 2026 Midterm Elections, with Jamie Carson. PS: Political Science & Politics. Forthcoming Forecasts the 2026 House elections with a nationalization-weighted Monte Carlo simulation. Accounting for 2024 presidential vote share substantially widens forecast uncertainty.
  8. A Random Walk Toward Creative Ideas. Work in progress Develops a formal model of abductive ideation as Brownian motion driven by discrete experiences drawn from a person-specific stochastic process. Curiosity excites the process and generates more ideas. The model has implications for whether current LLM systems can generate abductive ideas.
  9. Procurement and Backlash in Strategic Contracting: Evidence from Flock Safety. Work in progress Predicts local governments’ Flock Safety contracting decisions from administrative capacity, and public backlash from local political economy. Firms selling to governments must market themselves both to the buyer and to the buyer’s constituents.