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.

Kuokštis’ 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. He examines allied defense spending patterns using difference-in-differences methods, and separately runs 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 CISAC during 2025–26. His research spans international political economy and security, focusing on exchange rate regimes, labor market institutions, NATO burden-sharing, and fintech regulation. At CISAC, he is designing a survey experiment examining how changes in NATO allies' defense commitments shape Lithuanian public preferences on defense spending. He has published in journals including Political Science Research and Methods, European Journal of Political Economy, and JCMS. He previously held research positions at Harvard (Fulbright), Yale, and Hokkaido University.

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