Nicolai Schulz is a political scientist researching the political economy of development, with a focus on industrial and trade policy in sub-Saharan Africa. He holds a BA from the University of Konstanz, a MSc from the LSE, and works as a research associate at the University of Manchester Effective States and Inclusive Development research center. In Manchester, he leads a major research project quantifying political settlements through a large-scale expert survey. In his dissertation he explores how policy attribution and group size affect when governments in sub-Saharan Africa employ export bans on raw commodities to promote processing. To test rivaling explanations, he relies on the quantitative analysis of his original "African Export Restrictions Database" and in-depth comparative case studies across seven commodity sectors in Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania for which eight months of field work was conducted in 2017. In addition to his thesis work, he has published and worked on topics related to the determinants of civil wars, anti-corruption agencies, exchange rate valuation, and the political economy of green energy transitions.