# Max Whitford

> 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. His research covers nonmarket strategy, American political institutions, and law and economics.

Last updated: 2026-09-30

## Profile

- Name: Max Whitford; publishes as Maximillian B. Whitford
- Current: M.P.A. student, Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Georgia (expected 2028)
- Current: Research Fellow, Free Systems Lab, Stanford Graduate School of Business (since March 2026), working on AI governance
- Education: B.A. Economics, University of Georgia (2026), Phi Beta Kappa
- Research areas: nonmarket strategy; American political institutions; law and economics
- Core questions: how firms form beliefs about their regulatory environment and decide whether to comply; how public institutions, constrained by administrative capacity, form beliefs about firms and shape the legal environment in response
- Methods: text analysis of statutes, time-series econometrics, difference-in-differences, spectral clustering, formal models
- Coauthors: David Mustard, Jamie Carson, Andrew Whitford
- Plans: Ph.D. in business or economics
- Contact: mbw61040@uga.edu

## Papers

- Non-Monotonic Convergence of Policy Designs: Evidence from U.S. State-level Agritourism Statutes. Working paper. Structural topic model of every state agritourism statute; states converge toward an "optimal" design non-monotonically, consistent with learning in a multi-armed bandit or Callander's (2011) model of search.
- Visibility by Design: Evidence from Security Breach Notification Laws in the United States (with Andrew Whitford). Working paper. Text-as-data analysis showing that when public and private entities must disclose breaches varies by state and entity type, and that public-sector statutes are consistently thinner.
- The Marginal Ad in the Marginal District: Nonlinear Effects of Campaign Advertising (with Jamie Carson). Working paper. Spectral clustering of House candidates' TV ad strategies; in unfavorable districts, frequent ad-switchers perform better electorally than non-switchers, an association absent in competitive districts.
- Strategic Compliance with State-Level Age Verification Laws for Adult Content (with David Mustard). Working paper. Tracks ~6,200 live adult websites' compliance with state age-verification laws; less-visible sites and sites offering extreme or abusive content are much less likely to comply.
- Estimating Executive-Legislative Bargaining Dynamics: Evidence from Vector Autoregression Models. Working paper. Extends Hassell and Kernell (2016) with a VAR; presidential influence over the legislative agenda increased substantially from 1985 to 2008.
- Money and Vulnerability: Electoral Shocks and the Endogeneity of Incumbent Spending in U.S. House Races (with Jamie Carson). Working paper. Staggered difference-in-differences estimates of how electoral shocks shape incumbent spending.
- The Transmission Problem: A Nationalization-Weighted Forecast for the 2026 Midterm Elections (with Jamie Carson). Forthcoming, PS: Political Science & Politics. Nationalization-weighted Monte Carlo forecast; accounting for 2024 presidential vote share substantially widens forecast uncertainty.
- A Random Walk Toward Creative Ideas. Work in progress. Formal model of abductive ideation as Brownian motion driven by person-specific experiences; implications for whether current LLM systems can generate abductive ideas.
- 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.

## Links

- [Website](https://maxwhitford.github.io/)
- [CV](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTuwtOVWiupEWGhHw8J88rr8nGRjLbllnHjNT0DeJ7wo8Hfz4qeuNdASySgKKJWpSpzpd5iX9mPlvRj/pub)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/MaxWhitford)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-whitford-218216327)
- [Free Systems Lab team page](https://freesystems.net/team)