Energy & Digital Markets
Ongoing research on the economics of energy and digital markets — examining how market structure, regulation, and policy shape outcomes in these sectors — with Professors Hunt Allcott and Omer Karaduman.
Robert R. Leung (Tobi)
Pre-doctoral Research Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
robert.leung@stanford.edu · rnrleung@gmail.com · Curriculum Vitae
About
I am a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), where I study the economics of energy and digital markets under Professors Hunt Allcott and Omer Karaduman. My research broadly tackles questions of market design, regulation, and public policy. Most people know me as Tobi.
Before Stanford, I completed my MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics (EME) at the London School of Economics and a BS in Applied Mathematics at the Ateneo de Manila University. Outside of work, I spent my university years in competitive debating (winning the 2023 World Championship) — and now coach the wonderful, rambunctious children of WSDC Philippines.
Research
The Family Business: Political Succession and the Inheritance of Government Contracts
Using Philippine mayoral elections and public procurement awards, this paper studies what is inherited when political power passes within a family. In close open-seat races, a relative's victory sharply raises the survival and procurement share of the outgoing administration's suppliers — evidence that dynastic succession transmits relationship-specific political and economic capital across individual officeholders.
Smelling Smoke in the Signal: Wildfire Insurance Moratoria and the Housing Market
A staggered difference-in-differences study of California's wildfire insurance moratoria, showing that a moratorium designation itself acts as a public signal of future risk — driving large, persistent home-value declines even outside fire perimeters, alongside shifts in FAIR Plan enrollment, new listings, and mortgage lending.
The Families that Stay Together: A Network Analysis of Dynastic Power in Philippine Politics
A network-analytic study of political dynasties in the Philippines, measuring how kinship structures concentrate and reproduce political power over time. The paper applies tools from network science and quantitative political economy to a novel dataset of family and electoral linkages.
Projects
Open Halalan
The largest open-source dataset of Philippine national and local election results — every winning candidate since 2004 and full candidate-level vote counts since 2016. Non-partisan and volunteer-run, it grew out of my undergraduate thesis on political dynasties and is fully reproducible from the raw COMELEC scrapes.