Scott Masterson

I'm a Predoctoral Fellow at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I study how multinational firms structure themselves across borders, and what those structures mean for taxation, regulation, and policy.

Companies are webs: thousands of legal entities linked by ownership, threaded through jurisdictions chosen with intent. My research treats that web as the object of study, building graph-theoretic tools that detect structures like the Dutch Sandwich directly in ownership microdata covering millions of firms.

My path into network science started with a gift. A favorite professor at Emory handed me a hardcopy of a textbook on social and economic networks and asked me to extend a topic from his Industrial Organization course. I was fascinated by the geometry of network objects, a little shocked I hadn't met them sooner, and kept studying on my own after moving to California.

In my first week at Stanford, Prof. Rebecca Lester mentioned an early-stage project analyzing firm structure. I had serendipitously printed that same Emory paper days earlier, so I ran to my desk and grabbed it, and she put me on the project with the paper in hand. I've structured my Stanford career around network science and its overlaps with firm structure and place-based policy ever since. A full-circle moment was later taking Social and Economic Networks at Stanford with Matthew Jackson, whose textbook first introduced me to the field.

What sets my work apart is the pairing of network science with spatial analysis. Economic networks live somewhere. With ArcGIS Pro I put them back on the map: geographically embedded networks of firm locations, banking systems, and urban access.

I'm applying to PhD programs for Fall 2027 entry, spanning operations research, network science, economics, and accounting.