Empirical economist and data analyst based in Los Angeles. My background is unorthodox for someone in cryptomarket research — two years at The New York Times and a year as Opinion Columnist at The Daily Californian, where the arguments I wanted to make kept outrunning the available evidence. BA Political Economy, UC Berkeley (2023).

The research agenda followed naturally: cryptomarkets generate structured, bilateral listing-level data that the existing empirical literature on illicit trade almost entirely ignores in favor of seizure statistics. So I built the tools to use it, ran the analysis, and now I have something to say.

My work applies structural and reduced-form econometric methods to illicit digital markets. The current focus is the geography of digital drug trade — how enforcement architecture, bilateral institutions, and platform anonymity shape where illegal transactions actually happen.

Working paper: Anti-Gravity Exists: Evidence from Darknet Drug Markets (May 2026, SSRN). Prepared for submission to the Journal of International Economics. Active co-authorship with David Décary-Hétu (UdeM) extending the analysis to a 2013–2016 archive covering 22 markets.

The 8-stage multilingual drug classification pipeline — resolving vendor-entered listings into a 57-category pharmacological taxonomy across five languages — is available as a standalone tool at github.com/ryder-mawby/darknet-drug-classifier.

Data provided by Nicolas Christin (Carnegie Mellon University) and David Décary-Hétu (Université de Montréal). Specification guidance from Yoto Yotov (Drexel). Perspective on illicit market dynamics from Bryce Pardo (UNODC). Thesis guidance from Mariya Mileva (CSULB).