About the event: The Baltic states keep surprising researchers — and that is why they are worth studying. They survived the Global Financial Crisis without devaluing their currencies and recovered quickly, even though many economists expected them to fail. Estonia did better than its neighbors during that crisis, and this could not be explained by economic factors alone — political trust turned out to matter. Now, Lithuania has overtaken Estonia in per capita income, which few predicted, and which remains to be explained. The Baltic puzzles are not just regional curiosities. They point to open questions in political economy and security studies.

My current research focuses on NATO burden-sharing. The standard story is that allies spend too little on defense because others will cover for them — but whether this actually happens, and how, is less clear than conventional wisdom suggests. I examine allied defense spending patterns using difference-in-differences methods, and separately run a survey experiment in Lithuania testing whether the visible presence of allied forces changes how citizens view allied commitment and how much they are willing to spend on defense. Lithuania is a crucial case for this question: Germany has committed to stationing a full permanent brigade there, creating a real-world experiment that most NATO countries never experience. Can European power substitute for — or does it complement — American security guarantees? The answer matters a great deal for how alliances actually hold together.

About the speaker: Vytautas Kuokštis is an associate professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science (TSPMI), visiting Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) during the 2025–26 academic year. His research sits at the intersection of international political economy and security, with a focus on exchange rate regimes, labor market institutions, NATO burden-sharing, and the politics of financial technology (fintech).

At CISAC, Kuokštis is designing a survey experiment in Lithuania that examines how citizens respond to changes in NATO allies' defense commitments, and what this means for public preferences on national defense spending.

Kuokštis has published widely in journals including Political Science Research and Methods, European Journal of Political Economy, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Regulation & Governance, Policy & Politics, European Journal of Law and Economics, and European Security. Before coming to Stanford, Kuokštis held research positions at Harvard University (Fulbright Fellow), Yale University, and Hokkaido University. He received advanced quantitative methods training at Yale and the Essex Summer School, and organized the Baltic Studies Conference at Yale. At Vilnius University, he teaches courses on introductory economics, international political economy, and causal inference.

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