Category Archive: Sources

1. The Electric Forest

   April 24, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on The Electric Forest

   Agriculture and Trade

   The US government spends upwards of $20 billion annually on domestic agricultural support programs, but with over 20 percent of farm products exported, these programs interact with trade policies that have fluctuated in the last century between protectionism and liberalization.

   Investigating the origins of US agricultural trade policy, a 1989 article by JUDITH GOLDSTEIN looks to the New Deal to locate where a “divergence” emerged between policies for the agricultural and manufacturing sector.

   From the article:

   “Until the mid-1930s, both agriculture and manufactures were treated essentially alike: when either suffered economic decline, the usual state response was to increase trade barriers. The great economic decline of the 1930s undermined existing economic policy. [By the mid-1940s], a two-pronged strategy to address sectoral problems was enacted. The government was to help manufacturers gain access to foreign markets through a program of reciprocal tariff reductions. Agriculture was also to benefit from some tariff reductions, but largely it would be protected through a system of internal price supports and land-use policies. By the time the United States entered into negotiations over the workings of the trade regime, a decade of legislation had already established a policy of trade liberalization for industrial projects and trade protectionism to maintain farm incomes for agricultural products. A hegemonic position in the world economy did not ensure a consistent trade policy within the Unites States.

   In this article, I trace this divergence in industrial and farm policies. I argue that the key difference in the two policies turned not only on political interests but also on the beliefs of policymakers. Agricultural trade had run deficits consistently since the mid-1920s. When considering a range of possible remedies, policymakers dismissed liberalization as an option for farm products while embracing that “idea” for manufactures. And although agricultural has had surpluses since the war and manufacturing has had deficits since the early 1970s, the decision of the 1930s continue to structure current policy.”

   Link to the text.

   • “To varying degrees, most OECD states subscribed to a developmental or state-assisted paradigm by the end of the Second World War. This paradigm placed particular value on agriculture as a sector which was seen to be contributing to an important national goal: providing a secure and safe supply of food.” William Coleman’s 1998 article compares policy shifts in the agricultural sector in France, Germany, and the US. Link.
   • “Institutional capacities converged with a changing balance of class forces… to produce the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which, in turn, strengthened the conservative Farm Bureau and threatened the survival of many sharecroppers in the South.” In a 1991 article, Jess Gilbert and Carolyn Howe examine class divides and New Deal agricultural policy. Link.
   • “From a North-South battle, WTO negotiations on agricultural subsidies are now primarily centered on a conflict between the US and China.” Kristen Hopewell on US-China conflict and a shift in agricultural trade governance. Link. And a recent Congressional Research Service report notes a 53% decline in agricultural exports to China in 2018. Link.

   ‡ agriculture trade policy

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Ford Foundation in India

   A 2020 article by PhD Candidate in History at NYU GAURAV GARG examines the relationship between the newly-independent Indian government and the Ford Foundation in the 1950s.

   From the paper:

   “This article shows that prior to 1954, despite considerable complementarities between India’s development needs and the Foundation’s objectives and capacity to deliver, there was nothing to suggest that the Government of India saw the Ford Foundation as anything but a part of the larger American developmental apparatus. But from the mid 1950s, it began emphasising that its relationship with the Ford Foundation stood ‘on a separate footing’ from its ties with the US government and its agencies. I show that this move was motivated by the increasingly assertive and abrasive foreign policy regime helmed by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, especially between 1953 and 1956, which made the Government of India believe that its right to remain non-aligned was under threat. This resulted in the government exploring ways to reduce its dependence on official US policy. The Government of India chose to rely on the Ford Foundation for its objective of reducing dependence on official US aid because, as I show through a study of the Southern Languages Book Trust (SLBT), the government exercised considerable administrative leverage over the Ford Foundation’s operations in the country. This met with its policy of exerting as much managerial control as possible over foreign-funded development projects. The government’s influence on the Ford Foundation in turn was predicated on India’s centrality in the Ford Foundation’s international outreach.”

   Link to the paper.

   ‡ development  ngo  new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • We are hiring for a paid summer internship position, open to all CUNY undergrads, to work on JFI’s editorial team and the Phenomenal World. Please share widely. Link to the description and application details.
   • Two on semiconductors, global competition, and securing supply chains: a report by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a macro view from Skanda Amarnath and Alex Williams in Employ America. Link, link.
   • “We show with a variety of microdata that opposition to free trade predicts shifts towards Republican party identification.” Jiwon Choi, Ilyana Kuziemko, Ebonya Washington, and Gavin Wright on NAFTA, employment losses, and political preferences. Link.
   • “In the absence of government milk, private market prices would be 3% higher.” Diego Jiménez-Hernández and Enrique Seira investigate a national welfare program of government-sold milk in Mexico. Link.
   • “Secular change in both the production and composition of investment goods has weakened private investment’s role in the transmission of monetary policy to labor earnings and consumption.” By Justin Bloesch and Jacob Weber. Link.
   • New research by James Galbraith and Jahee Choi on state-level economic inequality and Presidential elections in the US. Link.
   • Home rule protection and municipal takeovers in New Jersey and Michigan. By Ashley Nickels. Link.
   • “The representation of traditional, always-sending, feeder high schools on the flagship campuses continued to dwarf the population of students from other high schools.” Kalena Cortes and Daniel Klasik on Texas’s Top 10% Plan for college admissions. Link.
   • Simone Gasperin examines the case of the state-holding company Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale in Italy in the 1930s. Link.
   • “We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author.” By Liam Kofi Bright and Haixin Dang. Link.
   • “Major epidemics of plague in Germany and France in the early eighteenth century and in Moscow in the 1770s brought an end to a series of epidemic disasters in Europe which had started with the Black Death. The article examines what they had in common, and seeks to understand why they should have ended when they did. It shows that European governors were unanimous in insisting on rigid quarantine and other measures for containing the disease developed over previous centuries, despite their ignorance of plague’s precise causes. It shows also that physicians across Europe were more deeply divided than they had ever been on the issue of contagion, and now engaged in an international dispute about whether the acknowledged cruelties inflicted by compulsory quarantines were wholly counterproductive, or a price worth paying for the prevention of still worse disasters. The article concludes by drawing on recent work on plague in the Ottoman Empire, and on research into the ancient DNA of the second pandemic, in order to set the epidemic history of western Europe in a wider comparative context.” By Paul Slack. Link.

2. Trooping the Colour

   April 17, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Trooping the Colour

   PETROSTATES

   In January 2021, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman unveiled plans to build ‘The Line’, a $500bn futuristic 170km carbon-free city strip in Neom destined to be fully automated, fueled by clean energy, linked to neighboring Jordan and Egypt, and at the core of Vision 2030, a national development plan to diversify the heavily oil-dependent Saudi economy. Critics have argued that the project provides little more than a ‘mix of science fiction and corporate buzzwords’ and that Mohammed bin Salman ‘thinks that building cities will happen in the same way as it does in video games.’

   Over the past decade, plans for megaprojects encompassing futuristic cities and large-scale transnational connectivity infrastructure across the global South have come to embody fantastical promises of modernity, development, and economic integration. What can political economy tell us about the relationship between resource-rich economies and such developmental fantasies?

   In a 1997 book, FERNANDO CORONIL explores how the circulation of oil rents shaped the process of state formation in Venezuela, where the national myths and the modern state were sealed with the particular properties of oil.

   From the introduction:

   “The acclaimed Venezuelan political commentator José Ignacio Carbujas related the state’s providential appearance to its worldly materiality and highlights the cultural and political effects of its extraordinary wealth. As if wishing to acknowledge and disavow the state’s exalted self-representation, he notes that in Venezuela the state is a ‘magnanimous sorcerer’ endowed with the power to replace reality with fictions propped up by oil wealth. ‘Oil is fantastic and induces fantasies,’ Carbujas says. Its power to awaken fantasies enables state leaders to fashion political life into a dazzling spectacle of national progress through ‘tricks of prestidigitation.’ State representatives, the visible embodiments of the invisible powers of oil money, appear on the state’s stage as powerful magicians who pull social reality, from public institutions to cosmogonies, out of a hat.

   In this book, I explore the appearance of the Venezuelan state as a transcendent and unifying agent of the nation. I argue that the deification of the state took place as part of the transformation of Venezuela into an oil nation. Thus transformed into a petrostate, the Venezuelan state came to hold not only the monopoly of political violence but of the nation’s natural wealth. The state has exercised this monopoly dramaturgically, securing compliance through the spectacular display of its imperious presence. The Venezuelan state has been constituted as a unifying force by producing fantasies of collective integration into centralized political institutions. By manufacturing dazzling manufacturing projects that engender collective fantasies of progress, it casts its spell over audience and performers alike. As a ‘magnanimous sorcerer,’ the state seizes its subjects by inducing a condition or state of being receptive to its illusions—a magical state.”

   Link to the text.

   • Japhy Wilson and Manuel Bayón’s 2017 article explores failures and absurdities of grandiose infrastructure projects, with a focus on the Mnata-Manaus multimodal transport corridor currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil. Link.
   • In a 2019 article, Seth Schindler and Miguel Kanai diagnose a global infrastructure-led development regime geared toward the design of cross-border territories that integrate resource frontiers and industrial hubs with the global economy via large-scale networked infrastructure. Link.
   • “The spatial separation of rich and poor that these new urban fantasies will entrench opens up the prospect of urban spatial and social inequalities at an unprecedented scale.” Vanessa Watson on plans to modernize cities in Sub-Saharan Africa in the model of Dubai, Shanghai, and Singapore. Link.

   ‡ petrostate development

   This top section of the newsletter was written by guest contributor Ilias Alami, a political economist based at Maastricht University and the author of Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets, which was shortlisted for the British International Studies Association 2019 best book in international political economy award. He is currently writing a book on state capitalism. He tweets at @IliasAlami.

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Fiscal Policy and Public/Private Debt

   PhD Candidate in political economy at the University of Sydney CHAIRUL ADI compares the fiscal multipliers of public and private debt.

   From the paper:

   “The research question in this paper is whether public and private debt affects the effectiveness of a fiscal policy; this paper will investigate the impact of public and private debt levels in determining the size of the fiscal multiplier. Instead of viewing private debt levels merely from the perspective of household debt, this paper will employ data of the domestic credit available to the private sector as the proxy of private debt. The analysis is presented based on a balanced panel consisting of 16 economies during the period from 1996 to 2012. The result of this paper supports the Keynesians’ argument that the increase in government spending should be expansionary. Government spending generates positive values for the impact multiplier, ranging from 0.29 to 0.44 and for the cumulative multiplier, for two years, of between 0.45 and 0.58. Revenue-based fiscal policies, on the other hand, seem to follow the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis, that views tax cuts as an inconsequential policy. Worthy of note, this paper proposes not to solely view the spending instrument as a total entity, but one should classify government spending into its separate elements, as it might lead to different results.”

   Link to the paper, link to Adi’s profile.

   ‡ debt fiscal_policy new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • We are hiring for a paid summer internship position, open to all CUNY undergrads, to work on JFI’s editorial team and the Phenomenal World. Please share widely. Link to the description and application details.
   • Next Friday, April 23, join us for a panel on the history of race and municipal finance in the US, featuring Destin Jenkins, Melinda Cooper, Sarah Quinn, Peter James Hudson, Yakov Feygin, David Stein, and Jonathan Levy. Register here. (See also this thread by Nic Johnson, who convened the panel, rounding up some prereadings from the panelists.)
   • Marshall Steinbaum in the Boston Review on two new books and the changing political valence of higher education. Link.
   • “Was the decline of global inequality causally connected to the increase of Northern intra-national inequality? Will there be a development of industrial societies in the South?” Göran Therborn on two historical turns of inequality. Link.
   • Karen Flint on Covid-19 vaccine trials and biomedical experimentation in Africa. Link.
   • Two on Paul Krugman and changing state of macro: Adam Tooze in the London Review of books; Nathan Tankus at Notes on the Crises. Link, link.
   • “When density was at its mid-century peak, union households were much less educated and more nonwhite than other households, whereas pre-World-War-II and today they are more similar to nonunion households on these dimensions.” Henry S Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu on unions and inequality across the 20th century. Link.
   • In Brookings, Arindrajit Dube lays out a plan to reform the unemployment insurance system. Link.
   • “Flat or declining spending left states ill equipped to respond to Covid-19.” Y. Natalia Alfonso, Jonathon P. Leider, Beth Resnick, J. Mac McCullough, and David Bishai on public health spending. Link.
   • Branko Milanović on the Soviet economic model and lessons for China. Link.
   • “I argue that organized women helped to make family planning a component of national planning for development.” Mytheli Sreenivas on tensions in women’s movement activity in India in the 1950s and 60s. Link.
   • “Shipping, central to the rise of the Atlantic economies, was an extremely hazardous activity. Going back to the work of North (1968) and Harley (1988), the consensus among economic historians has been that shipping technology was largely stagnant before the appearance of iron steamships in the mid-nineteenth century. In this paper, we show, instead, that between the 1780s and 1820s, a revolution in safety took place at sea that saw a halving of losses on oceanic routes, with smaller safety improvements on European routes. Driving this safety revolution were a broad range of gradual improvements both in the seaworthiness of ships and in their navigation.” By Morgan Kelly, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Peter M. Solar. Link.

3. Watermelon

   April 10, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Watermelon

   INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

   Amid the global Covid-19 vaccination campaign, a debate has emerged around intellectual property (IP) and stark inequalities in vaccine distribution. Wealthier nations have opposed a petition to waive the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which imposes a 20-year monopoly for pharmaceuticals among other global IP standards.

   In her 2008 book, CAROLYN DEERE turns to the domestic implementation of the TRIPS agreement across developing countries, finding large variations in new IP governance structures and enforcement.

   From the introduction:

   “Amidst growing debates on globalization and inequality, TRIPS became a symbol of the vulnerability of developing countries to coercive pressures from the most powerful developed countries and galvanized critics of the influence of multinational corporations on global economic rules. While IP advocates insisted that stronger IP protection could serve as a ‘power tool for development’, a host of prominent international economists, such as Jagdish Bhagwati and Joseph Stiglitz, questioned the place of TRIPS in the WTO system (and continue to do so). Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, among others, emphasized the costs to developing countries of introducing ‘irrelevant or unsuitable laws’ that restrict access to technologies and knowledge. Developing countries argued that TRIPS ignores the diversity of national needs and forces them to sacrifice the ‘policy space’ that richer countries harnessed in early stages of their growth.

   Given the vocal concern expressed by developing countries during the TRIPS negotiations and after it came into force, one would reasonably expect them to have taken full advantage of the possibilities the Agreement provides to tailor implementation to respond to national economic and social priorities. Careful examination of the empirical evidence from 1995 to 2007, however, reveals a more complex picture of how developing countries responded to this room for maneuver. There was striking diversity in the approach developing countries took to the implementation of TRIPS rights and obligations. Most notably, developing countries took varying advantage of the legal safeguards, options, and ambiguities in TRIPS, now commonly referred to as the TRIPS ‘flexibilities’. Further, a surprising number of developing country WTO members implemented even higher IP standards than those required by TRIPS. By contrast, some developing countries took advantage of a range of TRIPS flexibilities, but their approaches varied according to the type of IP (e.g. copyright or industrial property). Further, many developing countries missed their deadlines for bringing their laws into conformity with TRIPS, thus effectively claiming more flexibility than provided for in the Agreement. Across the developing world, governments struggled to upgrade institutional capacity and resources to effectively administer and enforce their IP laws.”

   Link to the text.

   • “A human rights frame for intellectual property does not, ineluctably, facilitate socially desirable outcomes for all countries; slapping human rights ideals on intellectual property regimes can, instead, actually strengthen intellectual property rights in non-socially helpful ways.” In chapter of Framing Intellectual Property Law in the 21st Century, Ruth L. Okedji demonstrates flaws in human rights-based critiques of IP. Link.
   • “The growing new bi- and pluri-lateralism of regional free trade agreements with their asymmetric intellectual property rules, the re-distribution of economic power among the developed and the emerging or rather the emerged countries, and the nature of strategic competition between globally acting multinational corporations have changed the rules of the game.” Hanns Ullrich revisits TRIPs amid changing conditions in global markets. Link.
   • In her 2003 book, Susan Sell looks at the role of twelve multinational corporations in the TRIPS negotiations. Link. And Hyo Yoon Kang blogs about TRIPS in the current vaccine debate. Link.

   ‡ intellectual_property inequality

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Inventories in Global Value Chains

   Assistant Professor and the University of Zurich Alessandro FERRARI’s job market paper looks at the role of inventories in the amplification of supply chain shocks.

   From the paper:

   “In this paper I combine these elements and study how shocks to final demand propagate upstream in the presence of inventories in an input-output economy. I show both theoretically and empirically that, indeed, when inventory adjustments are accounted for, final demand shocks are amplified upstream in value chains. These findings carry important implications for understanding the impact of such shocks in the economy. Models in which they diffuse and dissipate will, in particular, systematically understate their overall impact. A deeper understanding of this phenomenon is vitally important for policymakers when designing GVC participation policies, which remain a central topic in policy discussions.”

   Link to the chapter, link to Ferrari’s website.

   ‡ supply_chains new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • On April 23, join Phenomenal World and the Law, Letters, and Society Program of UChicago for a roundtable discussion featuring Destin Jenkins, Melinda Cooper, Sarah Quinn, Peter James Hudson, Yakov Feygin, David Stein, and Jonathan Levy, on Jenkin’s new book, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City. Register here.
   • We are hiring for a paid summer internship position, open to all CUNY students, to work on JFI’s editorial team and the Phenomenal World. Link to the job description and application details.
   • JFI is also hiring a research fellow with a background in statistics, social scientific methods, and policy design to work on our guaranteed income initiative. Link to the job description and application details.
   • “One common backlash you get talking about tech unionizing is that ‘workers in tech are well paid relative to other industries.’ Usually people say that with a Google software engineer in mind, not an Amazon warehouse worker.” An interview featuring Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya, JFI Fellow and Collective Actions in Tech organizer, in MIT Tech Review. Link.
   • Erling Barth, Alex Bryson, and Harald Dale-Olsen examine union density effects on productivity and wages. Link.
   • “This paper focuses on the British state’s attitude towards co-operatives, focusing mainly on the Thatcher (1979–1990) and Cameron (2010–2015) governments.” Thomas Da Costa Vieira and Emma Foster on “ordoliberalism.” Link.
   • Juan Santarcángelo and Juan Manuel Padin on the return to international financial debt during the Macri administration (2015-2019) in Argentina. Link.
   • “As a surplus of unmarketable primary commodities piled up in British colonies, as well as in Latin America and French, Dutch, and Belgian colonies, this jeapordized the blockade and threatened political unrest across the British Empire, as well as the spread of Nazi influence in Latin America.” Jamie Martin on the commodity glut during World War II. Link.
   • Matthew Shutzer on the politics of fossil fuel extraction in India from 1870 to 1975. Link.
   • Erik Lin Greenberg examines the influence of public opinion polling on likeliness that US military officers advise the use of force abroad. Link.
   • Matteo Rizzi and Maurizio Ateni compare organizing attempts by precarious transport workers in Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam. Link.
   • “We test whether liberty bonds led to changes in voting outcomes in presidential elections in the 1920s relative to those in the previous decade, in a panel of about 1,400 counties. The 1920s were a period of Republican dominance in presidential politics, with Harding, Coolidge and Hoover winning substantial majorities of the popular and electoral votes in 1920, 1924 and 1928. Previous scholarship has attributed these victories to the breakdown of the coalition that had supported Wilson. We posit instead that voters responded to changes in liberty bond prices by voting against the incumbent Democrats when they depreciated in value, and later voting for the incumbent Republicans following their appreciation. The results of our empirical analysis indicate that counties with higher liberty bond participation rates did indeed turn against the Democrats, relative to their voting patterns in earlier elections.” By Eric Hilt and Wendy M. Rahn. Link.

4. Birth of the Wolves

   April 3, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Birth of the Wolves

   CANALS

   Earlier this week, the blockage of the Suez Canal by the giant Ever Given container ship prompted renewed discussions on the weakness of our supply chain infrastructure, the future of globalization, and the region’s colonial past.

   In her 2013 book, VALESKA HUBER explores how the canal selectively shaped the movement of people and goods from its construction in 1869 until the First World War.

   From the introduction:

   “Mobility and acceleration are conventionally seen as central processes in shaping the history of globalisation. The Suez Canal appears in the literature on global history and the history of globalisation as soon as the ‘timespace compression’ starting in the second half of the nineteenth century is mentioned. In works on imperial expansion, the Suez Canal is equally present. Yet the increasingly rapid mobility which the Suez Canal came to symbolise had two sides: on the one hand a modernising force in the eyes of western observers, on the other a force that was difficult to control and which was connected with problems such as the worldwide propagation of disease or the movement of unruly individuals or groups. The period around 1900 was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Rather it was characterised by the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of different kinds of movement.

   The maritime shortcut of the Suez Canal has become a symbol of the ‘shortening’ of distances around 1900 and of the triumphant version of acceleration that stressed the transformation of a desert by means of modern technology. Yet it also highlighted the dangers and anxieties connected with this same acceleration. At this very location colonial traffic and troop transportation crossed the circuits of tourists, the journeys of pilgrims to Mecca, the trajectories of nomads and caravans, the work-related movements of seamen and coal heavers and the illicit passages of stowaways, smugglers and microbes. This kaleidoscope of movement shows how, in the context of the technological innovations of the second half of the nineteenth century, mobility became a marker of Western modernity. But it also makes clear how certain forms of mobility were increasingly regulated and stigmatised. While acceleration is often taken for granted, multiple processes of exclusion and deceleration were in fact in play.”

   Link to the text.

   • “The control of river systems and the practice of flood-control brought about an unprecedented ecological rupture in Eastern India, transforming the delta from a flood-dependent agrarian regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape.” In a 2006 book, Rohan D’Souza analyzes India’s environmental history through the politics of flood control. Link.
   • “Traditional theories proposed by Soviet scholars assume that a strong, long-term association exists between the management of irrigation systems and centralized political power. Focusing on the archaeological evidence pertaining to the construction of the Dargom, the primary canal of Samarkand, we suggest that it is not the result of a fixed master plan.” Sebastian Stride, Bernardo Rondelli and Simone Mantellini on “Political Power in the Oasis of Samarkand.” Link.
   • From 1948, an article by Carter Goodrich examines the construction of canals, turnpikes, and railroads to challenge conventional narratives on the noninterventionist American government. Link. And in a recent article, Valeska Huber argues that “social planning discourses and attempts to put them into practice are deeply intertwined with twentieth-century ideologies of the state.” Link.

   ‡ canals infrastructure planning

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Measuring Intangible Capital

   PhD candidate in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona SAMPREET GORAYA studies capital misallocation. A 2020 paper co-authored with Andrea Chiavari looks to define the role of intangible capital—investments in research and development, intellectual property, etc.—in production.

   From the paper:

   “In the last decades, firms’ investments in research and development, intellectual property product, and computerized information – commonly known as intangible capital – have risen significantly as measured by their share in total capital. However, because of its intangible nature, it is inherently difficult to evaluate how intangible capital interacts with other inputs of production, and how its emergence has changed the nature of production technologies. We estimate a standard production function augmented with intangible capital and show that its input share has tripled since the 1980s and this increase has come at the expense of labor in production. Further, we provide empirical evidence consistent with intangible capital being significantly more sunk, meaning that it entails higher investment adjustment costs than traditional capital. Finally, due to the presence of high adjustment costs, we show that intangible capital tends to be misallocated (i.e., the average product of intangible capital is more dispersed than the average product of traditional capital).”

   Link to the paper, link to Goraya’s website.

   ‡ production capital new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org .

   + + +

   • “The Berlin-Baghdad railroad is Germany’s Belt and Road at the turn of the twentieth century.” Ho-fung Hung relaunches Phenomenal Works, our recommended readings series on the site, with thoughts on how the early twentieth century provides insights for US-China relations. Link.
   • “Making development investible requires a two‐pronged strategy: enlist the state into risk‐proofing development assets and accelerate the structural transformation of local financial systems towards market‐based finance that better accommodates portfolio investors.” Daniela Gabor on the ‘Wall Street Consensus.’ Link.
   • In Foreign Policy, Adam Tooze on Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi. Link. (Revisit Tooze and Gabor in conversation in two of our events from last year: “Geoeconomics and the Balance of Payments,” and “Global Power in the North-Atlantic Financial System.” Link, link.)
   • Rebecca Neaera Abers, Federico Rossi, and Marisa von Bülow compare social movement strategies during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil and Argentina. Link. ht Paul
   • “In Brazil, oil production became an opportunity for a process of ecological transformation that promised to rid the country of colonial landscapes of exploitation.” Antoine Acker on Brazilian oil production between 1930 and 1975. Link.
   • “We find that droughts in pastoral areas lead to conflict in neighboring agricultural areas.” Eoin McGuirk and Nathan Nunn examine how effects of climate change can lead to conflict in Africa. Link.
   • Matteo Leombroni, Monika Piazzesi, Martin Schneider, and Ciaran Rogers investigate the structural changes behind the 1970s wealth dip in the US assets market. Link.
   • “Suffolk County imposing a presumption of nonprosecution for a set of nonviolent misdemeanor offenses had beneficial effects: the likelihood of future criminal justice involvement fell, with no increase in local crime rates.” By Amanda Agan, Jennifer Doleac, and Anna Harvey. Link.
   • “This article offers new evidence from an important early eighteenth-century construction site—St Paul’s Cathedral—which was the biggest and most important site in the City of London or Westminster in the decades after the Great Fire. It uses the working records of a prominent mason contractor of the actual number of days men in his team worked throughout the busy decade 1700–9 as the west front and dome were completed. On average men might only have worked 5.2 days per week in the long run, and if they did not have a regular employment relationship they could have worked less than 13 weeks in the year for any one employer. Employment was more irregular and seasonal than current estimates infer, which sheds light on debates about ‘industriousness’ and economic growth.” By Judy Stephenson. Link.

5. The Calligrapher

   March 27, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on The Calligrapher

   GUN CONTROL

   Frequent mass shootings and recurring political struggle over gun control measures are uniquely American social phenomena. The earliest proposals for US federal gun control legislation were met with an emergent organized opposition, whose effectiveness triumphed over wide approval for control measures among the public.

   In a 1981 article, CAROL SKALNIK LEFF and MARK LEFF examine the origins of this opposition and the eventual passage of “ineffective” firearms legislation during the interwar period.

   From the article:

   “The interwar period is notable less for the pervasive impact of its legislation than for the coalescence of the interest group matrix that has resisted firearms legislation ever since. Although the Justice Department preferred to put the onus for opposition to regulation onto the gun manufacturers, whose unpopularity as ‘merchants of death’ peaked between the wars, the most rigorous and effectual resistance came from sportsmen’s and wildlife organizations, and rifle, pistol, and revolver associations. Jointly, these groups were to play a decisive role in determining the scope of gun control efforts in the 1920s and 30s. The crux of the balance of power between regulators and antiregulators in the interwar period was that the Justice Department fought its gun control crusade with less intense and less mobilized allies, while facing a committed and organized resistance. The consequence was that the nascent gun lobby was in a strong position, not only to fight gun control, but to co-opt or redefine initiatives that seemed likely to gain a following.

   It was in the 1930s that gun control opponents faced their decisive test. To trace their response to mounting interest in federal regulation, it is most useful to focus on the organization that had moved to the forefront of the antiregulation movement, the NRA. The timing of the NRA’s emergence as a national force testifies to the galvanizing impact of the federal movement towards firearms regulation. From a roster of 3500 in the early 1920s, the NRA membership rolls expanded to 10 times that many by the time of the legislative debates of 1934. In one fundamental sense, the perspective on gun control as a cultural issue can be distorting if it at all implies that the individualist ethos extends to the methods utilized to wage antiregulation campaigns. Champions of individual rights were decidedly more organized than the regulators.”

   Link to the text.

   • “After the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King a groundswell of visible support for more decisive federal action temporarily materialized.” William Vizzard on the Gun Control of 1968. Link. And in a 2015 article, Vizzard revisits different eras of gun control legislation in the US. Link.
   • “A racialized framework—undergirding who is ‘a good guy with a gun’ versus ‘a bad guy with a gun’—informs and justifies how police understand and pursue public safety.” Jennifer Carlson on race, policing, and the politics of gun control. Link.
   • In a new Northwestern University Law Review paper, Joseph Blocher and Reva Siegel look at public safety regulation after Heller. Link. And link to an essay elaborating on the paper.

   ‡ gun_control lobbying policy

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Port Efficiency in Brazil

   PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign VINICIOS SANT’ANNA studies international trade and migration. A 2018 paper co-authored with Sérgio Kannebley Júnior investigates turnaround times at ports and effects on Brazilian exports.

   From the abstract:

   “This paper estimates the impact of vessels turnaround time on Brazilian exports. To achieve this goal, we use a difference gravity equation in order to explore the time variation in port procedures for 16 Brazilian ports. This paper uses a unique database with local exports, taking into account the port used and products aggregated at the four‐digit Harmonized System (HS) level for the period between 2010 and 2012. The estimation results indicate that, in general, each additional hour of delay in port procedures represents costs to Brazilian exporters, which may lead to loss of competitiveness of domestic products abroad. According to the estimates, each additional relative hour of delay in the average port is equivalent to a reduction in relative local exports of ~2%. Moreover, a 10% relative reduction in vessel turnaround time can increase the proportional number of exported product categories by 1%. Therefore, our findings suggest that turnaround time has a statistically significant effect on the intensive and extensive margins of international trade.”

   Link to the paper, link to Sant’Anna’s website.

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: (text: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org email:editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org).

   + + +

   • On April 23, Phenomenal World and the Law, Letters, and Society program at the University of Chicago are hosting a roundtable discussion on the forthcoming book by Destin Jenkins, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City. The event will feature Jenkins, Melinda Cooper, Sarah Quinn, Peter James Hudson, Yakov Feygin, David Stein, and Jonathan Levy. Link to register.
   • A new JFI paper by Khalil Esmkhani, Jack Favilukis, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh models a universal cash transfer in New York City, “with particular focus on how it affects real estate and the urban environment.” Read the full paper here, and read Stephen Nuñez’s post situating the research within the broader macro literature here.
   • “We find that unreported income as a fraction of true income rises from 7% in the bottom 50% to more than 20% in the top 1%.” John Guyton, Patrick Langetieg, Daniel Reck, Max Risch, and Gabriel Zucman on tax evasion. Link.
   • Adam Tooze’s newsletter tackles the question of getting the EU to carbon-neutrality by 2050. Link. Relatedly, new paper on green industrial strategy for Norway, by Rainer Kattel, Mariana Mazzucato, Jonas Algers and Olga Mikheeva. Link.
   • Kornel Chang on “democratization as decolonization management” in Korea under US occupation, 1945-1948. Link.
   • “Using 61 indicators of democratic performance from 2000 to 2018, we develop a measure of subnational democratic performance. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in nationalparty coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.” Jacob Grumbach on “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.” Link
   • Isabel Knößlsdorfer, Jorge Sellare, and Matin Qaim on the effects of fair-trade certification for farmers in Côte d’Ivoire. Link.
   • Iñaki Aldasoro, Wenqian Huang and Nikola Tarashev on the relationship between bank regulations, asset managers, and market liquidity. Link.
   • A new evidence review finds that “smaller farms, on average, have higher yields and harbour greater crop and non-crop biodiversity at the farm and landscape scales than do larger farms.” Link.
   • FT Alphaville’s part-time boat correspondent Brendan Greeley explains the hydrodynamics that stuck the Ever Given in the Suez Canal. Link.
   • “We explore the causal connection between weather and war by constructing and analyzing a dataset featuring extreme weather events and military conflicts involving a set of stable political entities that existed side by side over several centuries, namely, the three ancient kingdoms of the Korean Peninsula between 18 Before the Common Era and 660 Common Era. Conflicts are classified as desperate if a state experiencing the shock invades a neighbor and opportunistic if a state experiencing the shock is invaded by a neighbor. We find that weather-induced conflict was significant, but largely opportunistic rather than desperate. That is, states experiencing an adverse shock were more likely to be invaded, but not more likely to initiate attack. We also provide evidence that the channel through which weather shocks gave rise to opportunistic invasions was food insecurity, which weakened the power of states to repel attack.” By Tackseung Jun and Rajiv Sethi. Link.

6. Peacock

   March 20, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Peacock

   STRUCTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

   Debates concerning the relative role of structure versus agency in explaining social phenomena has endured for decades. Drawing parallels between the teleology of nineteenth century approaches and more modern, variable-oriented research methods, historian WILLIAM SEWELL JR’s 2005 book reflects on the pitfalls of structural thinking, and posits a path forward.

   From the book:

   “Structure is one of the most important and elusive terms in the vocabulary of current social science. If social scientists find it impossible to do without the term structure, we also find it nearly impossible to define it adequately. The term structure empowers what it designates. Structure, in its nominative sense, always implies structure in its transitive verbal sense. Whatever aspect of social life we designate as structure is posited as structuring some other aspect of social existence. Structure operates in social scientific discourse as a powerful metonymic device, identifying some part of a complex social reality as explaining the whole.

   The most fundamental problem in the current use of the term is that it tends to assume a far too rigid causal determinism in social life. Those features of social existence denominated as structures tend to be reified and treated as primary, hard, and immutable, like the girders of a building, while the events or social processes they structure tend to be seen as secondary and superficial, like the skin of a skyscraper. What tends to get lost in the language of structure is the efficacy of human action, or agency. But the notion of structure does denominate, however problematically, something very important about social relations: the tendency of patterns of relations to be reproduced, even when actors engaging in relations are unaware of the patterns or do not desire their reproduction.”

   Link to the book.

   • “Most social science research would never get off the ground if we had first to resolve the fundamental questions about being and knowing. Nevertheless, some reflection on the foundations of knowledge is necessary as a preliminary to all research.” Donatella della Porta and Michael Keating reflect on the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of qualitative research. Link.
   • “‘Social change’ is not a general pro­cess, but a catchall name for very different processes varying greatly in their connection to each other.” From Tilly’s Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. Link.
   • In a 2010 paper, Anna Grzymala-Busse examines the role of time in shaping causality: “When dynamics are conflated with causes, aspects of temporality such as duration, tempo, and timing are invoked as misleading proxies for mechanisms and assumed, rather than shown, to have a causal role.” Link.

   ‡ methodology causality research

   NEW RESEARCH

   Global Sourcing and Input Trade

   In her job market paper, PhD candidate in Economics at Vanderbilt University TRANG HOANG models the dynamics of input imports by using a sample of Chinese chemical producers between 2000 and 2006.

   From the paper:

   “This paper presents and estimates a dynamic, multi-country model of input imports with heterogeneous firms. The model incorporates intra-temporal interdependence across countries, while an inter-temporal link is embedded in the country-specific sunk entry costs. I document a new set of stylized facts about Chinese chemicals producers between 2000 and 2006. Chemicals is an important industry to study for a few reasons. In 2007, China became the world’s second largest chemicals manufacturer. In 2017, China’s chemical industry accounts for $1.5 trillion of sales, equivalent to 40 percent of the global chemical-industry revenue. The chemicals industry accounts for $10.8 billion of US exports and $15.4 billion of Chinese exports that are subject to increased tariffs during the current US-China trade war. The baseline results indicate that source countries are complementary in the sense that sourcing from an additional country increases the marginal benefits of other countries. Furthermore, a continuing importer pays between 7.81% and 27.06% of the average marginal revenue gain, while the average importing cost for a new importer is higher, ranging between 12.87% and 39.75% of the revenue gain of importing from a new source. The existence of interdependence across countries and location-specific sunk costs implies that temporary trade policy changes in one market can have long-lasting externalities on other markets.”

   Link to the paper, link to Hoang’s website.

   ‡ trade imports new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • “The emergency basic income program launched in response to the pandemic distributed checks which were much higher than unemployment insurance or even the Bolsa Familia, but food insecurity increased. Why? Because people were paying off their existing debts.” On Phenomenal World, a transcript of our panel on Brazilian party politics and social policy, with Lena Lavinas, Barbara Weinstein, and André Singer. Link.
   • “The lesson is clear: our policies are only as good as the plumbing that delivers them.” JFI’s Stephen Nuñez and Rachel Black in Business Insider on stimulus checks and how to make America’s cash disbursement infrastructure work. Link.
   • JFI Fellow Michael Pizzi, along with Mila Romanoff and Tim Engelhardt, examines AI in humanitarian action. Link.
   • Mia Gray and Anna Barford find that austerity cuts were twice as deep in England compared to the rest of the UK. Link.
   • José Antonio Ocampo and Gabriel Porcile compare industrial policy in four Latin American countries, using Korea as a benchmark. Link.
   • “We provide the first comprehensive study of the ECB’s advocacy of structural reforms during the period 1999–2019.” By Benjamin Braun, Donato Di Carlo, Sebastian Diessner, and Maximilian Dusterhöft. Link.
   • “Inflation fears and the Biden stimulus: Look to the Korean War, not Vietnam.” By Joseph Gagnon. Link.
   • On federal health financing regimes and responses to Covid-19 in the US, Canada, and Mexico. By Daniel Béland, Gregory Marchildon, Anahely Medrano, and Philip Rocco. Link.
   • New analysis on the impacts of expanded unemployment insurance, by Peter Ganong, Fiona Greig, Max Liebeskind, Pascal Noel, Daniel M. Sullivan, Joseph S. Vavra. Link. h/t reader Omeed M.
   • “We find highly significant differences between low income countries (LICs) where the central bank targets monetary aggregates or inflation compared to LICs that maintain rigid nominal exchange rates.” Alina Carare, Carlos de Resende, Andrew Levin, and Chelsea Zhang analyze monetary policy across 79 LICs from 1990 to 2015. Link.
   • Gregori Galofré-Vilà, Christopher M. Meissner, Martin McKee, and David Stuckler on austerity and the rise of the Nazi Party. Link.
   • “We find that city-level repeal is associated with a 14.7% decrease in homicide rates and a 10.1% decrease in mortality rates associated with other accidents.” David Jacks, Krishna Pendakur, and Hitoshi Shigeoka on the effects of federal prohibition repeal from 1933 to 1936. Link.
   • “The automobile generated a demand for strong, durable gears which was quite unprecedented. Here the technological interrelations between the bicycle and the automobile are particularly clear, since the most important innovator in the grinding of gear teeth was the Leland and Faulconer Company. ‘Faulconer was, in 1899, the first to design a machine for production grinding of hardened bevel gears for bicycles.’ This was the same firm which was later to become the Cadillac Automobile Company. The earliest automobile firms drew very heavily upon the business and technical leadership, plant facilities, and skilled labor of the bicycle industry, the decline in which coincided exactly (in the first decade of the century) with the rapid growth of automobiles.” Nathan Rosenberg on machine tools and technological change. Link.

7. Development in Rose

   March 13, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Development in Rose

   PUBLIC HEALTH & MEDICINE

   The Covid-19 pandemic has brought attention to the underfunding of US public health infrastructure over the last several decades. Alongside a fragmented system, a gap has emerged between public health and clinical care, with consequences for the public.

   A 2000 article by ALLAN BRANDT and MARTHA GARDNER offers insight into the historical origins of this divide, tracing the “antagonism” between public health and medical fields in the US to the early 20th century.

   From the text:

   “As the medical profession became more homogenous and powerful, medicine increasingly viewed public health interventions as a potential infringement on the doctor-patient relationship. Early 20th-century calls for the reporting of communicable diseases, such as tuberculosis and syphilis, came under sharp attack from physicians’ professional organizations on these grounds. Physicians complained that such reporting requirements would ultimately dissuade patients from seeking care. Public health officials insisted that the public good periodically required the abrogation of individual rights. The interests of the state in policing individuals with communicable diseases now seemed at odds with the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship.

   The delivery of health services by public health agencies appeared to threaten the economic well-being of the rising medical profession. Institutions and programs from outpatient dispensaries to well-baby care, from diagnostic laboratories to school-based nursing, came under attack as incursions into the medical profession’s domain. Public health officials were quick to identify the economic interests behind these protests, labeling such attacks on state authority as mere hypocrisy and medical self-interest. Even so, medicine generally triumphed in direct political conflicts. Innovative programs such as the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which was organized to ensure prenatal and postnatal care for mothers and infants, fell prey to medicine’s lobbying in Congress and the state legislatures. The rise of the hospital, focused on acute tertiary care, as the preeminent institution of modern medicine further separated medicine from public health. Public health officials no doubt chafed at the notion of ending their efforts at the hospital’s door. Instead, legislative and administrative proposals for neighborhood public health centers that could combine public health interventions with clinical care were derailed by medical interests because of concerns about provision of ‘free care’ to potential paying patients.”

   Link to the article.

   • “US health policy has become too focused on medical care as the primary policy lever.” Paula Lantz, Richard Lichtenstein and Harold Pollack on the “limits of medicalization.” Link.
   • “Social medicine in the Anglo-American context remained closely bound to the bio-psycho-socio-model of chronic disease that underpinned lifestyle-based, behavioral models of prevention after the Second World War.” Dorothy Porter examines the divergent paths of social medicine in Latin America and the US. Link.
   • Nayan Shah examines public health enforcement in Chinese immigrant communities in San Francisco. Link. And Natalia Molina looks at public health policy in Los Angeles. Link.

   ‡ healthcare public_health

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Organizational Dynamics in Wage Inequality

   PhD student in sociology at Harvard University CLEM AEPPLI studies inequality, labor, and race in the United States. A recent working paper for Equitable Growth, co-authored with Nathan Wilmers, examines the consolidation of occupation and workplace premiums and subsequent effects on wage inequality.

   From the paper:

   “High-paying workplaces once employed low-skill workers in circumstances ranging from unionized manufacturing assembly jobs to maintenance and food service positions at large corporate headquarters. Moreover, previously many members of high-paying occupations—like doctors, teachers, and psychiatrists—worked in low-paying service workplaces. In this paper, we show that these cases of offsetting mismatch between occupation and workplace premiums have become more rare. Over time, the workers benefiting from employment at a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. We call the ensuing correlation between different sources of advantage consolidated inequality. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, we show that two-thirds of the rise in wage inequality since 1999 can be accounted for not by occupation or workplace inequality alone, but by their increased consolidation. Workplace premiums associated with teams of professionals have increased, while premiums for previously high-paid blue-collar workers have been cut. Yet the largest source of consolidation is bifurcation in the social sector, whereby some previously low-paying but high-professional share workplaces, like hospitals and schools, have deskilled their jobs, while others have raised pay.”

   Link to the paper, link to Aeppli’s profile.

   ‡ inequality employment new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • In CBS News, JFI’s Stephen Nuñez discusses the Child Tax Credit and its “huge impact on child poverty in the United States.” Link.
   • JFI Senior Fellow Claudia Sahm comments on the Covid-19 relief package in Mother Jones and Yahoo Finance. Link, and link.
   • “In the case of Amazon, which instituted a $15 minimum wage in October 2018, our estimates imply that a 10% increase in Amazon’s advertised hourly wages led to an average increase of 2.6% among other employers in the same commuting zone.” Ellora Derenoncourt, Clemens Noelke, and David Weil on the spillover effects from voluntary employer wage increases. Link.
   • A new study finds that the Amazon rainforest is transforming from a carbon sink into a carbon source. Link.
   • In the FT, Daniela Gabor and Crystal Simeoni examine proposals to expand the IMF’s special drawing rights system to the African bond market. Link.
   • “We find that while automatic government spending is, as expected, countercyclical in industrial countries, it is, surprisingly, procyclical in the developing world.” By Luciana Galeano, Alejandro Izquierdo, Jorge Puig, Carlos Vegh, and Guillermo Vuletin. Link.
   • “Relative to the positive welfare effects of a trade-cost reduction in standard models, our model implies a sizeable welfare cost associated with the increased land-usage of ports.” César Ducruet, Réka Juhász, Dávid Krisztián Nagy, and Claudia Steinwender on port development. Link.
   • Katrine Jakobsen, Kristian Jakobsen, Henrik Kleven, and Gabriel Zucman on wealth accumulation after the 1989 reform and subsequent abolition of Denmark’s wealth tax. Link.
   • On the effects of Fox News viewership during Covid-19. By Elliott Ash, Sergio Galletta, Dominik Hangartner,Yotam Margalit, and Matteo Pinna. Link.
   • Pablo Gabriel Bortz charts the trajectory of Keynes’ theories of the business cycle. Link.
   • “During the final years of the minority of King Henry III, the wardrobe emerged as the king’s personal administrative office. Accompanying the king on his perambulations across England and France, the wardrobe was chiefly responsible for collecting and disbursing revenue for his daily needs. The wardrobe thereby superseded the chamber, to which government records make little further reference until the late fourteenth century. The activities of the wardrobe during the reign of Henry III are recorded in a sequence of 15 accounts. The wardrobe’s financial strength was the result of a new, and deliberate, approach to acquiring revenue beyond the treasury that targeted sources of income that could generate cash quickly. During Henry’s final years, this included greater reliance on credit.” By Benjamin Wild. Link.

8. Clown Underwater

   March 6, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Clown Underwater

   PERSONNEL DEPARTMENTS

   Deindustrialization is a key orienting point for research in political economy. But around the world, factory production remains significant, with employment in industry constituting between one-fifth and one-third of total employment in large economies.

   While factory production persists, its form and function has changed dramatically. In his 2004 book, SANFORD JACOBY analyzes the bureaucratization of employment through the lens of factory organization, and particularly through the early-twentieth-century invention of the personnel department.

   From the text:

   “This book treats bureaucratic employment practices as the outcome of a prolonged struggle to overcome the insecurity and inequities produced by a market-oriented employment system. The struggle was played out both within management and between management and other groups. Within management, the conflict between the traditional and the bureaucratic approach to employment was epitomized by clashes between the production division and the new personnel departments that began to appear after 1910. The creation of a personnel department signaled that employment policy would now be treated as an end in itself rather than as a means to the production division’s ends. One of the personnel manager’s chief responsibilities was to stabilize labor relations, a task that required trading off short-term efficiency in the interests of achieving high employee morale over the long run.

   But personnel management was more than a new slot in the corporate hierarchy. Unlike marketing or finance, it was deeply affected by developments external to the firm, such as changes in social attitudes and norms regarding industrial employment. Because it had its roots in various Progressive reform movements, personnel management was influenced by new middle-class beliefs in the necessity of market intervention, the beneficial effects of rational administration, and the power of the educated expert to mediate and mitigate social conflict. Many early personnel managers thought of themselves as neutral professionals, whose job was to reconcile opposing industrial interests and make employment practices more scientific and humane. Personnel management and the new bureaucratic approach to employment did not gradually take hold in an ever-growing number of firms. Instead they were adopted during two periods of crisis for the traditional system of employment—World War I and the Great Depression.”

   Link to the book.

   • In a 2005 paper, Jacoby, Emily Nason, and Kazuro Saguchi analyze the organizational role of senior HR executives in the US and Japan. Link.
   • “This paper charts the transformation of the employment relationship in different industries during the second quarter of this century.” James N. Baron, Frank R. Dobbin, and P. Devereaux Jennings analyze institutional sources of change in American employment structures from the Great Depression to the end of WWII. Link.
   • “Why did cotton manufacturers adopt factory production? And why did their factories grow so large?” In his 2018 book, Joshua Freeman examines the proliferation of the factory across global systems of production. Link.

   ‡ bureaucracy employment

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Housing Costs of Oil and Gas Extraction

   PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign MARIYA SHAPPO studies urban and environmental economics. In her job market paper, Shappo investigates the long-term effects of oil and gas extraction in Pennsylvania.

   From the paper:

   “In Pennsylvania, it is estimated that as many as 300,000 to 760,000 wells have been drilled since 1859. When the production period ends, many wells are left behind and some remain unplugged. In this paper, I turn to the housing market to quantify (i) the long-term environmental costs of oil and gas extraction and (ii) the benefits of clean-up, using rich data on oil and gas drilling activity, house sales, and lease agreements in Pennsylvania. I find that if wells are left unplugged, the long-term consequences of drilling are negative and substantial. Unplugged wells decrease sale prices of nearby houses by 4 to 24 percent, depending on the number of wells and their proximity. This is a much larger loss in comparison to depreciation caused by new, active drilling. However, when abandoned wells are plugged, house prices restore almost completely. The estimates also imply that the benefits of plugging are larger than the costs. This paper focuses on older, abandoned wells and sheds light on the long-term housing market impact of oil and gas extraction—not only during the boom but also during the bust.”

   Link to the paper, link to Shappo’s website.

   ‡ oil housing new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • A new paper by Alexander Chudik, Kamiar Mohaddes, and Mehdi Raissi evaluates the macroeconomic effects of countries’ discretionary fiscal actions in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Link.
   • “This paper introduces a novel inequality concept called income composition inequality, which describes how the composition of income in two sources, such as capital and labor income, varies across the income distribution.” By Marco Rinaldi. Link.
   • Jessica Green conducts a meta-analysis of carbon pricing studies, finding that “carbon pricing has a limited impact on emissions.” Link. h/t Paul
   • “Principles of Sectoral Bargaining”: a statement on sectoral bargaining plans in an environment of low worker power and fissured workplaces. By Veena Dubal, Sanjukta Paul, Marshall Steinbaum, Aaron Sojourner, Suresh Naidu, Nelson Lichenstein, and more. Link.
   • “Contrary to a popular narrative, the backlash is not associated with a large swing in public opinion against globalization but is rather a result of its politicization.” Stefanie Walter on the causes and misdiagnoses of the backlash against globalization. Link.
   • Bench Ansfield on riot reinsurance and redlining following 1960s uprisings across US cities. Link.
   • “We find that spending cuts decrease government approval, especially during economic downturns, but tax increases’ impact on approval remains minimal. Finally, left- and right-wing governments are equally likely to lose approval after implementing austerity.” By Olivier Jacques and Lukas Haffert. Link.
   • Karn Vohra et al. on global mortality, pollution, and fossil fuels. Link.
   • A paper by Jarkko Harju, Simon Jäger, and Benjamin Schoefer on the effects of 1991 introduction of worker representation on boards in large firms (150 employees or higher) in Finland. Link.
   • “Did England work any harder during the Industrial Revolution? Marx said so, and so did E. P. Thompson, but we had no way to know. Instead of using problematic sources, more than 2,000 men and women from eighteenth-century London give evidence in this study. They appear as witnesses before the Old Bailey to answer a simple question: ‘What did you do at the time of the crime?’ Sometime between 1750 and 1800, Londoners began to work longer—much longer.” Hans-Joachim Voth analyses testimonies from the “yellow presses” to examine and calculate working-hours in eighteenth century London. Link.

9. Queen Mab’s Cave

   February 27, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on Queen Mab’s Cave

   AGRICULTURAL REFORM

   Since November 2020, thousands of Indian farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and other states have protested the implementation of national market-based agricultural reforms.

   A look to a series of liberalization measures in the 1990s, which did not specifically address agriculture, reveals a dramatic restructuring of the agricultural sector. In a 2017 paper, Abhijit Sen and Jayati Ghosh investigate the impacts of these measures, highlighting shifts in investment, subsidies, and credit that inform the current debate.

   From the paper:

   “In the initial years, the reforms package did not include any specific policies specifically designed for agriculture. In the early 1990s, it was felt that the devaluation of the rupee had already provided sufficient incentive to agriculture, because it was expected to make it more attractive to export crops and thereby improve farm incomes. However, even if no explicit attention was paid to agriculture, various economic policies and other changes in patterns of government spending and financial measures had significant implications for the conditions of cultivation.

   Over the initial period of economic reforms, which coincided with government attempts at fiscal stabilisation, there were actual declines in government expenditure on agriculture and rural development. Thereafter, there were cuts in particular subsidies such as on fertilizer in real terms, and the 1990s experienced overall decline in per capita government expenditure on rural areas in both absolute per capita terms and shares of GDP and aggregate public spending. There were also very substantial declines in public infrastructure and energy investments that affect the rural areas. These were especially marked in irrigation and transport, both of which matter for agricultural growth and productivity. In addition, financial liberalisation measures, including the emerging scope of what was designated as ‘priority sector lending’ by banks, effectively reduced the availability of institutional credit. Although the problem of credit access to cultivators was far from solved in India, the nationalization of banks had caused some positive differences, as public sector banks made more efforts to open rural branches and rural accounts, and to provide more crop loans to farmers. But after 1993 in particular, various financial liberalization measures, and the explicit and implicit incentives provided to public sector banks, made this much less attractive for bankers who anyway faced very high transaction costs when dealing with agricultural lending. The growth of branches, accounts and lending to agriculture all decelerated and in some states showed absolute declines. This forced many cultivators, particularly smaller farmers, tenant farmers and those without clear titles to land, to seek recourse to informal channels of credit like input dealers and traditional moneylenders. All this made farm investment and working capital for cultivation more expensive and more difficult, especially for smaller farmers.”

   Link to the text.

   • “Farmers played a crucial role in Modi’s initial election triumph after he promised to double their incomes in five years… But Modi failed to keep that promise, and farmers instead received prices that were even lower relative to their costs than they had been under the previous government.” In a recent op-ed, Ghosh comments on the farmers’ protests. Link. And Anumeha Yadav examines the role of landless and Dalit farmers, who own only 3.5 percent of farmland in Punjab, in the protests. Link.
   • “In Bihar, the abolition of the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Act in 2006 was unable to bring in new investment, consequently market efficiency deteriorated.” In the Hindustan Times, Sukpal Singh on the effects of reforms similar to those passed at the national level in a single state. Link.
   • “The crisis has reached unprecedented gravity, to the extent that cultivators were forced to take their own lives rather than live a life of extreme poverty, mounting debt burden and the agony of not being able to pay back the debts.” Anita Gill and Lakhwinder Singh on the rise of farmer suicides between 1997 and 2004. Link. And Tamma Carleton finds that warming temperatures have contributed to the ongoing crisis. Link.

   ‡ agriculture markets india

   NEW RESEARCHERS

   Desegregation and Magnet Schools in Chicago

   Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago NICHOLAS KRYCZKA studies urban history and desegregation in the United States. In a 2019 paper, Kryczka investigates efforts towards choice-driven desegregation in Chicago public schools in the 1970s.

   From the paper:

   “In Chicago, the prolonged absence of any program of mandatory transfer had made school integration a matter of ‘choice.’ By the time authorities intervened—via a state desegregation plan in 1977 and a federal civil rights suit in 1979—magnets were the only policy with a supportive constituency and a ready pot of federal funds. With black Chicagoans hardly unanimous in their inclinations toward integration, white Southwest Siders continuing their tradition of resistance, and new Latino organizations echoing their opposition to acarreo forzada (“forced busing”), magnet schools sidestepped ethnic politics. The plans that followed—Access to Excellence in 1977 and Options for Knowledge in 1982—avoided mandated transfer and expanded the menu of non-neighborhood school choices. While no one disputed that magnets were integrated, the fact was that there were too few. With parental choice channeled into a contest characterized by extreme scarcity, magnets carried the expectation of an elite experience and shifted the criteria for success in urban education. Offering one of the stronger critiques of the emerging educational marketplace, the Chicago Urban League declared that choice-driven programs—whether bilingual centers in Pilsen, classical schools in Chatham, or entrance exams at Whitney Young—had a shared mission: to keep the black and poor far away from those who were not black and poor.”

   Link to the paper, link to Kryczka’s profile.

   ‡ urban_history public_schools new_researchers

   Each week we highlight research from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Send us recommendations: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

   + + +

   • “It is now time to take a broader look at the connections between the rise of merchant capitalism, in which slavery played a central role, and British economic growth.” Nuala Zahedieh on William Forbes and the copper industry’s role in colonial markets. Link.
   • “Our estimates show that private equity ownership increases the short-term mortality of Medicare patients by 10%, implying 20,150 lives lost due to PE ownership over our twelve-year sample period.” By Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta. Link.
   • In Bloomberg, Catherine Traywick, Mark Chediak, Naureen S. Malik, and Josh Saul on what went wrong with the Texas electric grid. Link.
   • “This article argues the Fed rescues banks not because it is captured by financial interests, but because it is captured by the paradigm of systemic risk.” By Onur Özgöde. Link. h/t Paul
   • “Within local industries over time, a 10% increase in the average wage is associated with a 0.15% decrease in the number of violations per employee and a 4% decrease in fines per dollar of pay.” Ioana Marinescu, Yue Qiu, and Aaron Sojourner on wage inequality and labor rights violations. Link.
   • Carolyn Sissoko on the collateral supply effect in central bank policy. Link.
   • “The continuity of foreign direct investment-oriented growth is traced to the corporate politics of business-state elite deals.” Dorothee Bohle and Aidan Regan compare growth models in Hungary and Ireland. Link.
   • Javier D. Donna and Jose-Antonio Espin-Sanchez examine water theft as social insurance in Spain, 1851-1948. Link.
   • “Manchuria (Northeast China), which attracted millions of migrants from North China during the first half of the twentieth century, experienced a devastating pneumonic plague outbreak in 1910–11. Using data from a rural household survey in the mid-1930s, we explore how the post plague conditions in various villages affected migrant cohorts’ long-term wealth accumulation. We find that the migrant households that moved to plague-hit villages soon after the plague ended prospered the most: they owned at least 112% more land than migrant households that either moved elsewhere or migrated to the same village before or long after the plague outbreak.” By Dan Li and Nan Li. Link.

10. The Great Conspiracy

    February 20, 2021 12:00 am Comments Off on The Great Conspiracy

    ELECTRICITY

    Earlier this week, millions of households lost power in the face of a powerful snowstorm. While these numbers are unusual, they are not new—the US suffers among the most frequent power outages of any industrialized country, concentrated especially in rural areas and the South.

    In a recent paper, ABBY SPINAK analyzes the political trajectory of America’s weak electrical infrastructure by comparing the underlying economic assumptions of the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration (REA) with those of the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission in Canada.

    From the paper:

    “In the early twentieth century, experiments in electricity were experiments in statecraft. A malleable technology with significant financing and distribution challenges, electricity was a proxy through which budding welfare states could hash out their responsibilities to the public. Early public electrification efforts became sites of deliberation about balancing urban and rural needs, industrial development, and the public interest. Through electrification programs, policymakers in industrializing countries proposed and tested ideas of economic citizenship, the proper role for government, and the limits of private enterprise. Vibrant forums within and between industrializing nations intensely debated whether electricity was a right or a privilege—and where and for whom.

    Why did REA power flow not quite so freely as it did in Ontario? With an explicit charter not to distinguish between private, municipal, or cooperative power companies for dispersal of loans, the REA focused on keeping rates low and distributing power to areas where it could encourage rapid economic growth. It only begrudgingly supported the use of federal loans in the construction of generating stations where power could not be purchased inexpensively enough through the private market. Despite the explicit connection of the REA to Dust Bowl mitigation efforts, its emphasis was less on protecting natural resources for the common good and more on ensuring the efficiency and sustainability of natural resources for national economic growth. In the latter case, who owned what mattered much less than how capably it would be put to use.”

    Link to the piece.

    • “Although REA programs were planned and administered in Washington, D.C., western residents rather than New Deal administrators initiated most of the region’s rural electrification projects.” Brian Q. Cannon on “Rural Electrical Cooperatives and the New Deal.” Link. & Carl Kitchens and Price Fishback examine “The Spatial Impact of the Rural Electrification Administration 1935-1940.” Link.
    • “Africa is the most undersupplied region in the world when it comes to electricity, but its economies are utterly dependent on it.” David A. McDonald introduces a book of collected essays on inequality and electrification across the continent. (Also inside: river privatization and hydropower, nuclear energy in South Africa, corporate power in Uganda.) Link.
    • Wuyuan Peng Jiahua Pan with a history of rural electrification in China. Link. And from Jonathan Coopersmith’s 2016 book: “Electrification transformed capital markets, the military, manufacturing, the spatial geography of cities, and many other facets of Russian life.” Link.

    ‡ electricity history new_deal

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Cash Transfers in South Africa

    PhD Candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley ERIN TORKELSON studies state-sponsored unconditional cash transfer programs in South Africa. A 2020 paper looks at the relationship between cash transfer programs, regimes of credit, and privately-operated financial inclusion tools.

    From the paper:

    “Theorizing from South Africa, I illustrate how relations of power work in and through technologies of ‘financially inclusive’ cash transfer to promote credit with minimal risk for lenders. South Africa provides non-contributory, unconditional, means-tested monthly stipends for 17.6 million people (30.8% of the population). And yet, to say South Africa provides these grants is a misstatement: while the program is government-funded, the material provision of grants was outsourced to a global financial technology firm. In 2012, the South African Social Security Agency contracted Cash Paymaster Services to distribute grants nationwide. Their parent company, Net1 UEPS Technologies (Net1), listed on the Johannesburg and NASDAQ stock exchanges, used subsidiaries to sell financial inclusion products to grantees, including loans, insurance, utilities, and payments. As a monopoly service provider, Net1 had unrestricted access to South African grantees both in person and via their electronic data. Net1 was well positioned to make grant payments, sell financial products, and extract repayments for these products without bearing any risk. There was no possibility for grantees to default on their debts because repayments no longer depended on consumer behavior. As loan repayments to Net1 whittled away the promised value of social entitlements, grantees turned to other formal and informal lenders, many of whom were also repaid early and automatically through this same financial system. Net1 reaped significant profits from social grant payment through their government contract and their sale of financial inclusion products. In fact, between 2015 and 2017, Net1 made more money from their financial inclusion products than from the distribution of social grants.”

    Link to the paper, link to Torkelson’s website.

    ‡ cash_transfers development new_researchers

    Each week we highlight great work from a graduate student, postdoc, or early-career professor. Have you read any excellent research recently that you’d like to see shared here? Send it our way: editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.

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    • A new report by Laura Beamer and Eduard Nilaj, with support from Marshall Steinbaum, illustrates the many inequalities of the student debt crisis and the distributional effects of debt forgiveness. Link. And see the Millennial Student Debt Comparison Tool to examine data by state and congressional district level. Link.
    • “Within their existing base, [communists and socialists] abandoned a conception of the party as a living feature of public life, shifting their efforts towards negotiating a seat at the governing table.” In Tribune, an essay on the European shift to neoliberalism by PW Editor Maya Adereth. Link.
    • “Mitterrand shows that if the path of radical reformism is challenging and uncertain, the alternative has been disastrous.” An essay by Jonah Birch in “Market Economy, Market Society.” Link.
    • JFI is pleased to welcome Claudia Sahm as Senior Fellow in Guaranteed Income and Friederike Schuur as Fellow in AI Ethics and Digital Governance, a joint position with UN Global Pulse.
    • “I argue—contrary to Chetty et al.—that the $1,400 checks should go to everyone who received a $600 check.” A new brief by Senior Fellow Claudia Sahm. Link.
    • “This study conceptualizes international monetary hierarchy by focusing on different mechanisms to supply emergency US-Dollar liquidity from the Federal Reserve to non-US central banks.” Steffen Murau, Fabian Pape and Tobias Pforr on swap lines, the FIMA repo facility, and Special Drawing Rights. Link.
    • Lars Karlsson and Peter Hedberg on the impact of wars on bilateral trade flows from 1830 to 1913. Link.
    • “We present a model of duopolistic competition with returns to loyalty and show under what conditions exogenous changes to state protection causes gangs to change governance levels.” By Christopher Blattman, Gustavo Duncan, Benjamin Lessing and Santiago Tobón. Link.
    • Pablo Pérez Ahumada on the challenges to reforming collective labor law in Chile following the Pinochet dictatorship. Link.
    • “Using a novel database of regional trade flows between 267 European regions for 2013, this paper examines how government quality affects trade between European Union (EU) regions.” By Javier Barbero, Giovanni Mandras, Ernesto Rodríguez Crespo, and Andrés Rodríguez Pose. Link.
    • Christina Kinane analyzes “deliberate inaction” through vacancies in presidential appointments from 1977 to 2016. Link.
    • “This article analyses data on British millionaires, collected by the Inland Revenue (IR) from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, especially a unique individual-level dataset of millionaires for the 1928/9 tax year, based on an IR list of all incomes in excess of £50,000—equivalent to a capitalized value of £1 million. In common with earlier studies, traditional landed wealth is found to be in decline. However, this study shows that by 1928 millionaire wealth was dominated not only by business incomes, but by ‘businesspeople’ who played an active role in the management of their firms. Many of their enterprises had experienced rapid growth in sales and, especially, profits since 1914, on account of cartelization and/or amalgamation, together with high barriers to domestic competition and imports. ” By Peter Scott. Link.