Category Archive: Sources

  1. The Continuous Moment

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    STATES AND MARKETS

    The conclusion of the United States election has prompted a resurgence of commentaries on the state’s role in markets. By focusing on the state’s capacity to shape and alter market structure, these discussions build on a longstanding academic tradition which overturned classical historical accounts of free markets.

    Among the most influential texts is CHARLES TILLY’s 1990 book, which examines the co-development of commercial capitalism and nation states.

    From the introduction:

    “The story concerns capital and coercion. It recounts the ways that wielders of coercion, who played the major part in the creation of national states, drew for their own purposes on manipulators of capital, whose activities generated cities. Men who controlled concentrated means of coercion (armies, navies, police forces, weapons, and their equivalent) ordinarily tried to use them to extend the range of population and resources over which they wielded power. When they encountered no one with comparable control of coercion, they conquered; when they met rivals, they made war. War, and preparation for war, involved rulers in extracting the means of war from others who held the essential resources—men, arms, supplies, or money to buy them—and who were reluctant to surrender them without strong pressure or compensation.

    The organization of major social classes within a state’s territory, and their relations to the state, significantly affected the strategies rulers employed to extract resources, the resistance they met, the struggle that resulted, and the sorts of durable organization that extraction and struggle laid down. These relations varied significantly from Europe’s coercion-intensive regions to its capital-intensive regions. The demands major classes made on the state, and their influence over the state, varied correspondingly. The increasing scale of war and the knitting together of the European state system through commercial, military, and diplomatic interaction eventually gave the war-making advantage to those states that could field standing armies; states having access to a combination of large rural populations, capitalists, and relatively commercialized economies won out. They set the terms of war, and their form of state became the predominant one in Europe. Eventually European states converged on that form: the national state. “

    Link to the book.

    • A 2019 article by Didac Queralt compares tax-financed and externally-financed wars from 1816 to argue that “globalization of capital markets in the nineteenth century undermined the association between war, state making, and political reform.” Link. And a recent article by Roberto Bonfatti, Adam Brzezinski, K. Kıvanç Karaman, and Nuno Pedro G. Palma draws on “money stock and tax revenue data for European states from antiquity to the modern period” to argue that “monetary and fiscal capacity, and by extension, markets and states, have a symbiotic relationship.” Link.
    • In the most recent edition of Herman Mark Schwartz’s States Versus Markets, a helpful overview of debates on the Great Divergence: “Other ancient agrarian empires, like China and the Ottomans, were successful in monetizing their territory, taxing peasants, and subordinating both merchants and the landed aristocracy. But no European state succeeded in unifying Europe.” Link.
    • “The emergence of a peculiarly British version of the fiscal-military state, complete with large armies and navies, industrious administrators, high taxes and huge debts, was not the inevitable result of the nation’s entry into European war but the unintended consequence of the political crisis which racked the British state after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.” From John Brewer’s classic Sinews of Power. Link. And a recent article by Benoît Maréchaux challenges Brewer’s traditional narrative by “analyzing the business organisation and activities of Genoese naval entrepreneurs who managed galleys for the Spanish Empire in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.” Link.
    ‡ nation_state markets commercial_capitalism

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Health Insurance Mergers

    PhD Candidate in Economics at Yale University OSCAR SOLER SANCHEZ studies industrial organization with a focus on health economics. In a 2020 paper, Soler Sanchez models concentration in the employer-sponsored health insurance market and the effects of mergers.

    From the extended abstract:

    “To study the welfare effects of hypothetical insurer mergers I estimate a model of insurer-hospital competition that incorporates employer’s demand for health insurance. Three main features of the model interact to define the effects of mergers. First, insurers and hospitals bargain over hospital reimbursements. Second, insurers set plan premiums. Third, medium-sized employers demand healthcare plans. The model easily accommodates cost efficiency gains to insurers from the mergers, and I estimate the efficiency gains that would be required to compensate for decreases in consumer welfare. Using data from Massachusetts, I estimate the model for the market of medium size firms in the fully-insured market.

    My main finding is that premiums rise, and consumer welfare falls in all the hypothetical mergers that I analyze, although magnitudes vary with the size of the merger partners. Mergers that include the largest insurer in the market, BCBS, create the largest drop in consumer welfare (up to 17%), and the highest increase in premiums (up to 24%). The merger currently under review, between HPHC and Tufts, would reduce consumer welfare by 11.1%, and increase premiums by as much as 17%. For this merger, I estimate that a reduction of $957 (26%) in non-inpatient marginal cost for each plan would be required to overcome the negative effect on consumer surplus.”

    Link to the text, link to Soler Sanchez’s website.

    ‡ health_insurance merger 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.

    + + +

    • Join us on Friday, November 20 at 3 pm ET for a research session on “Unequal Burden: Black Borrowers & The Student Loan Debt Crisis” led by Nicole Perry of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. RSVP to editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.
    • “In developing countries, especially in mono-export economies, exchange rate problems have the potential to be a source of macroeconomic instability, but exchange rate policy has not received the same protections from politics.” By Nonso Obikili. Link.
    • Francesco Amodio and Nicolás de Roux examine labor market power and wage suppression in Colombia, finding that “workers produce about 30% more than their wage level.” Link.
    • Rahim Kurwa on policing and local opposition to the federal Housing Choice Voucher program in Los Angeles. Link.
    • “In low-income countries, people actively preparing to emigrate have 30 percent higher incomes than others overall, 14 percent higher incomes explained by observable traits such as schooling.” By Michael Clemens and Mariapia Mendola. Link.
    • Anita Mukherjee finds that inmates in private prisons serve an additional 90 days in part due to a greater likelihood of conduct violations. Link.
    • Saad Ahmad, Nuno Limão, Sarah Oliver and Serge Shikher find that Brexit uncertainty lowered UK-EU services trade by more than 20 percent between 2016 and 2018. Link.
    • Alberto Bracci et al. investigate the Covid-19 shadow economy, examining dark web markets that sell counterfeit vaccines. Link.
    • “Although individual level demographic data before 1538 is sparse we have abundant evidence of the lives of the European nobility. This analysis exploits recent mass digitization of family trees to examine trends in elite adult lifespan over the millennium between 800 and 1800. Plague, which afflicted Europe 1348-1700, killed nobles at a much lower rate than it did the general population. There were significant declines in the proportion of male deaths from battle violence, mostly before 1550. I am able to estimate, from the timing of deaths within the year, the fraction of males who died violently in each epoch. Before 1550, 30 percent of noblemen died in battle. After 1550, it was less than 5 percent. There was a common upwards trend in the adult lifespan of nobles even before 1800. But this improvement was concentrated in two periods. Around 1400, and then again around 1650, there were relatively sudden upwards movements in longevity.” By Neil Cummins. Link.

  2. Gathering

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    WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

    With Covid-19 cases again rising around the globe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has faced increased scrutiny from governments on its handling of the early pandemic. Today, the organization plays a key role in defining global public health and coordinating responses to disease, but this mandate has shifted over time.

    A 2011 paper by THEODORE BROWN, MARCOS CUETO, and ELIZABETH FEE investigates the origins of WHO’s current global public health program and its partnerships with non-governmental institutions.

    From the paper:

    “In January 1992, the Executive Board of the World Health Assembly decided to appoint a ‘working group’ to recommend how WHO could be most effective in international health work in light of the ‘global change’ rapidly overtaking the world. The executive board may have been responding, in part, to the Children’s Vaccine Initiative, perceived within WHO as an attempted ‘coup’ by UNICEF, the World Bank, the UN Development Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, and several other players seeking to wrest control of vaccine development. The working group’s final report of May 1993 recommended that WHO—if it was to maintain leadership of the health sector—must overhaul its fragmented management of global, regional, and country programs, diminish the competition between regular and extrabudgetary programs, and, above all, increase the emphasis within WHO on global health issues and WHO’s coordinating role in that domain.

    In 1998, the World Health Assembly reached outside the ranks of WHO for a new leader who could restore credibility to the organization and provide it with a new vision: Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and a physician and public health professional. She established a Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, chaired by economist Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University and including former ministers of finance and officers from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the UN Development Program, as well as public health leaders. The commission issued a report in December 2001, which argued that improving health in developing countries was essential to their economic development. The report identified a set of disease priorities that would require focused intervention. Brundtland also began to strengthen WHO’s financial position, largely by organizing ‘global partnerships’ and ‘global funds’ to bring together ‘stakeholders’—private donors, governments, and bilateral and multilateral agencies—to concentrate on specific targets. A very significant player in these partnerships was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which committed more than $1.7 billion between 1998 and 2000 to an international program to prevent or eliminate diseases in the world’s poorest nations, mainly through vaccines and immunization programs.Within a few years, some 70 ‘global health partnerships’ had been created.”

    Link to the piece.

    • Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Nikolai Kremenstov offer an account of the 1978 Alma-Ata conference, which was hosted by the Soviet Union and advocated for a WHO focus on primary health care. Link. David A. Tejada de Rivero recounts WHO’s move to selective primary health care, relying on smaller, low-cost interventions. Link.
    • “Infectious diseases have gained ground as global health priorities, while non-communicable diseases and the broader issues of health systems development have been neglected.” By Eeva Ollila. Link.
    • “Although the [World Bank’s] role in generating and disseminating global health knowledge is important, its main advantage compared with other international institutions is its ability to mobilize financial resources.” Jennifer Prah Ruger looks at the role of the World Bank, which began to increase its influence in global public health in the 1980s. Link.
    ‡ WHO global_health healthcare

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Technocratic Reforms and Higher Education in Chile

    Assistant Professor at EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance PABLO MUÑOZ HENRÍQUEZ studies labor economics, political economy, and the effects of state repression. In a 2020 joint paper, Muñoz examines the long-term consequences of Augusto Pinochet’s higher education policies in Chile.

    From the paper:

    “In the case of Chile, the technocratic reforms implemented during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) are often credited for the country’s economic success over the past 35 years. These reforms were spearheaded by a group of economists known as the ‘Chicago Boys’, as most had been trained at the University of Chicago. In this paper, we shed light on the socioeconomic costs of the Pinochet dictatorship’s technocratic agenda. We focus on the capture of higher education in the early years of the regime. During this period, the government assumed control of all universities in the country and steadily reduced spending on higher education. This led to a steady reduction in the number of openings for incoming college students and caused a large decrease in enrollment for cohorts reaching college age in the following years. Contrary to the technocrats’ claim that universities were bloated and had low returns, we find that the affected cohorts had worse economic outcomes throughout the life cycle and struggled to climb up the socioeconomic ladder. Decades after democratization, children with a parent in these cohorts also have a lower probability of college enrollment.”

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

    ‡ higher_education social_mobility 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.

    + + +

    • Join us on Monday, November 9 at 12 pm ET for a panel moderated by Adam Tooze on “Global Power in the North-Atlantic Financial System.” Link to register and see more information on the panelists.
    • The next meeting of JFI’s Social Wealth Seminar will take place on Tuesday, November 10 at 6 pm ET. The event will feature Steve Randy Waldman, editor at Interfluidity, on perspectives on social wealth funds. RSVP to sws-reservations@jainfamilyinstitute.org.
    • “The Electoral College today is about 40 times as likely as a National Popular Vote to generate scenarios in which a small number of ballots in a pivotal voting unit determines the Presidency.” By Michael Geruso and Dean Spears. Link.
    • A 2011 article by Kristina M. Campbell shows how Arizona became the center of the immigrant rights movement. Link. And a 2016 article by Walter Nicholls et al. looks at tensions between Arizona-based activists and national immigrant rights organizations. Link.
    • “We show that even if fossil fuel emissions were immediately halted, current trends in global food systems would prevent the achievement of the 1.5°C target and, by the end of the century, threaten the achievement of the 2°C target.” Michael Clark et al. on food system challenges in meeting the Paris Agreement goal. Link.
    • Andrea Pozzer et al. estimate that air pollution contributed to 15% of Covid-19 mortality worldwide. Link.
    • Lavinia Conca, Francesco Manta, Domenico Morrone, and Pierluigi Toma find that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting has a positive effect on European agri-food companies’ profits. Link.
    • Benjamin Bennett, Isil Erel, Léa H. Stern, and Zexi Wang study state-level paid family leave policies, finding positive effects on corporate productivity. Link.
    • “Using previously unexploited archival data [the estimi, property tax registers] I examine the time path of inequality from 1300 to 1800 in northwestern Italy, in particular the domains of the House of Savoy, which today broadly correspond to the Piedmont region. This is an important region of Italy as the Savoys played a fundamental role in the process of unification of the country (completed in 1861). The time series of inequality measures presented here span five centuries and provide new insights into economic development in this pivotal region. The data supports three major findings. First, from the late Middle Ages and throughout the early modern period, inequality in northwestern Italy grew almost continuously, both in cities and in rural areas; the only exception being the period immediately following the Black Death. Second, in examining the consequences of the Black Death, I find that its effects differ from subsequent mortality crises of comparable scale (in particular, the 1630 plague), probably due to institutional change. Third, inequality increased both in periods of economic growth and of economic decline or stagnation.” By Guido Alfani. Link.

  3. Calling the Dogs

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    SUPREME COURT

    The confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court has sparked ongoing debates over the institution’s merits and relationship to American democracy. Among liberal democracies, the United States stands apart in the strength and autonomy of its judiciary. A 2010 book by STEPHEN SKOWRONEK demonstrates that this strength originates in political developments following the Civil War and Reconstruction.

    From the text:

    “The demise of the Radical Republican crusade and the resurgence of the Democrats in 1874 ushered in an extended period of intense electoral competition in American politics. The major parties organized the electorate into two highly mobilized and evenly divided political armies contending for the spoils of the federal government. The creation of more centralized, stable, and functionally specific institutional connections between state and society was impeded by the tenacity of this highly mobilized, highly competitive and locally oriented party democracy. The distinctive logic of institutional modernization in this context was bounded, on one side, by the fact that America had never developed a dynasty, a nobility, a standing army, or an insulated bureaucracy, and, on the other, by the fact that it had far outpaced all other states in the development of organizations of mass democracy. At the very time that parties were developing in Europe to challenge the hegemony of more traditional state institutions, state-building efforts in America aimed at the disintegration of party hegemony as it had developed over the course of a century.

    It should come as no surprise that the power of the courts grew with the power of party machines. The judiciary’s governing capacities were stretched to their limits in the late 19th century to fill the ‘void in governance’ left between party hegemony and rapid social change. As Congress tore down the Civil War institutional apparatus with one hand, it vastly expanded the jurisdiction of the federal courts with the other. The expansion of federal judicial power in the late nineteenth century was the natural response of the early American state to demands for national authority in the industrial age. By the 1890s, the Supreme Court had articulated principles of nationalism, substantive due process, and constitutional laissez-faire that extended and consolidated its traditional hold over governmental operations. But no matter how authoritative and aggressive the courts were, they could not hope to supervise the new economy or manage the kinds of conflicts to which it gave rise.”

    Link to the book.

    • “Beginning soon after the Civil War, 19th century common law understandings of the public obligations of associative communities in a confederated republic were replaced by a new emphasis on the constitutional rights of individual citizens in a nation-state—one insistently expanding its regulatory authority.” William J. Novak challenges Skoronek’s account, arguing that the American state was “stronger, larger, more durable, and more interventionist” than the literature suggests. Link.
    • Keith E. Whittington on executive interest in strengthening the Supreme Court: “The political incentives that lead presidents to choose either to challenge or to defer to the Court’s constitutional leadership have shaped both the substance of our constitutional understandings and practices and the place of the judiciary within the constitutional order.” Link.
    • “I argue that the expansion of federal judicial power in the late-19th century is best understood as the sort of familiar partisan or programmatic entrenchment that we frequently associate with legislative delegations to executive or quasi-executive agencies.” Howard Gillman argues that the strengthening of the courts was a “by-product of Republican Party efforts” to enact an agenda of economic nationalism. Link.
    ‡ supreme_court judiciary partisanship

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Political Profit from Nonprofits

    PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po CAMILLE URVOY studies campaigns and public economics. In a 2020 paper, Urvoy examines electoral motives behind government transfers to nonprofits in France.

    From the abstract:

    “Do politicians give money to nonprofit organizations to improve their electoral prospects? In this paper, I study how politicians allocate governmental transfers to nonprofit organizations in France, where they cannot make campaign contributions by law, and campaign spending is limited. To identify electorally motivated transfers, I test whether government officials channel more resources to organizations in municipalities headed by a political ally. Using close elections providing quasi-random variation in mayors’ political affiliation, I show that the government grants significantly more transfers to nonprofit organizations where a well-connected political ally is electorally at risk. Politicians favor ideologically close and influential organizations. The extra amount nonprofit organizations receive dwarfs that spent on campaigning by the average mayoral candidate. Finally, I show that money granted to nonprofit organizations contribute to increasing the lead of ruling party candidates in local elections. My results document a new way politicians use money to sway voters, and provide a more complete picture of how money impacts politics.”

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

    ‡ elections nonprofit 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.

    + + +

    • “Among roughly 4.5 million distinct voters in Washington state between 2011 and 2018, we estimate that there are 14 deceased individuals whose ballots might have been cast suspiciously long after their death, representing 0.0003% of voters.” Stanford’s Democracy & Polarization Lab on claims of fraudulent voting by mail. Link
    • “The three major election vendors in the US are owned by private equity. Together they account for almost 80 percent of all election equipment used in the United States.” Susan Halpern on private ownership of voting machines. Link. And a 2018 ProPublica investigation of a major voting machine manufacturer plagued with controversy. Link.
    • Melanie Long on the intersections of race and gender in informal borrowing and financial exclusion. Link.
    • Jesse Chanin on educators’ struggles for collective bargaining in New Orleans between 1965 and 1974. “They connected their demand for collective bargaining to racial and economic equity in the schools.” Link.
    • Daniel Fitzpatrick and Rebecca Monson examine property rights and climate migration in the Solomon Islands. Link.
    • Tom Gillepsie on redevelopment in Accra, Ghana and the production of a ‘real estate frontier,’ “characterized by the incremental and contested commodification of state land to enable the growth of the real estate sector in the city.” Link.
    • Sonan Memon and Irfan Qureshi look at macroeconomic instability and income inequality in 61 developed and developing economies between 1990 and 2019. Link.
    • Lucy Sorensen, Youngsung Kim, and Moontae Hwang compare the effects of New York State’s 2011 property tax cap on low-wealth and high-wealth school districts. Link.
    • “This article offers a comparative approach to understanding the development of Neolithic to Late Iron Age (c. 5600–50 BC) farming communities in north-eastern Iberia, based on diachronic changes in the volume and shape of underground storage silos. Foodstuff storage was an essential element in the socio-economic trajectory of prehistoric and protohistoric north-east Iberia. This study correlates variations in average and maximum silo volume with changes in agriculture and domestic unit productivity. The range of silos with average capacities below 1000 litres concurs with other archaeological evidence for small, self-sufficient households, presumably practising intensive small-scale farming. Storage pits with capacities of between 1000 and 3000 litres reflect more complex societies. Our study identifies a dynamic, diachronic trend in maximum storage capacity, showing a dramatic increase from the Neolithic (with silos containing up to 2000 litres) to the Late Iron Age, when some silos contain up to 20,000, or even 60,000 or 80,000 litres. This emphasises the importance and impact of trade or exchange on the agricultural development of north-eastern Iberia.” By Georgina Prats, Ferran Antolín, and Natàlia Alonso. Link.

  4. Counter Music

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    ELECTORAL STRATEGY

    India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has dominated Indian politics in the past decade, upending the country’s long-standing Congress Party rule at the national level and competing with regional and ethnic parties in state elections. While the BJP’s Hindu nationalist ideology and economic agenda appeal to elite Hindu voters, the party has also secured votes from marginalized communities, using tactics that fall outside of well-documented clientelist models.

    In a 2011 paper, political scientist TARIQ THACHIL examines the role of nonstate service provision in building lower-caste support for the BJP, which has been central to the party’s electoral success.

    From the text:

    “The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) efforts to woo lower castes were seen as particularly daunting, given that the Brahminical ideology it espouses has largely been understood as one appealing to Hindu elites and not to those subjected to the daily humiliations of caste practice or to those whose spiritual traditions have been denigrated as improper or even uncivilized. Further, the party supported policies that largely appealed to upper castes, whose economic interests and preferences were the diametrical opposite of those of most poor voters. However, recent electoral evidence suggests several instances of counterintuitive support for the BJP from two of India’s most marginalized communities: Dalits (former “untouchable” castes) and Adivasis (India’s indigenous tribal populations).

    I analyze how the upper-caste BJP has relied on the services provided by its grassroots affiliates in the Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar (family of organizations) to make unexpected inroads among lower-caste voters in India. I argue that even when used to win votes, service provision should not be narrowly classified as simply a variant of clientelist strategy. There can be no doubt that a major part of the appeal of services for poor communities is material, particularly in areas where basic health and educational services remain woefully inadequate, as they do still in many parts of India. Yet to be successful, service activists had to provide services over multiple electoral cycles without linking provision to the quid pro quo protocol that underpins clientelist exchange. Further, to provide services reliably, activists must literally embed themselves within communities. This embedded quality generated several nonmaterial mechanisms through which activists could affect political choices, including even those of many voters not directly benefiting from their services. Providers exploit their formally nonpartisan status and the high regard accruing from their dedicated provision to garner credibility and influence within their local communities.”

    Link to the paper.

    • “Vidya Bharati ran approximately 6,000 schools in the late 1980s, and by 2003 this number had reached a total of 19,741.” In an earlier paper, Thachil argues that India’s defunding of education facilitated the growth of private schools (called Vidya Bharati) run by Hindu nationalist group RSS, which played a key role in service provision to rural communities. Link.
    • Susan Stokes’ definitive account of clientelism emphasizes the centrality of excludable benefits and qui pro quo exchange. Link. James C. Scott’s earlier work defines patron-client relationships through their socioeconomic asymmetries. Link.
    • For more on the BJP’s rise, see Pradeep Chhibber’s 1999 book on the transformation of India’s party system and Christophe Jaffrelot’s 1996 book on the Hindu nationalist movement. Link, and link.
    ‡ clientelism elections india

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    The Latin American service sector since 1980

    Postdoctoral researcher at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi, Brazil GRACIELE PEREIRA GUEDES studies the growth of the Latin American service sector using new data. In a new English-language summary of her dissertation, she presents key findings from her study of 18 Latin American countries from 1980 to 2014.

    From the summary:

    “Although the most recent service employment literature has investigated the explanations for the different trajectories and characteristics of service sector development in developed economies, the characteristics of LA (Latin American) tertiarization remain partially unexplored. This leads to the following questions: has service sector employment simply unfolded in a delayed fashion in LA countries, or does it have its own contours? Moreover, which factors account for the expansion of service sector employment within LA countries? This study seeks to address these questions by investigating 18 LA countries over the 1980–2014 timeframe.

    The main results suggest that, although the LA service sector is distributive-based par excellence, some distinct long-term moves occurred. It is remarkable that greater variations were observed in the producer subsector and, within the social subsector, in health activities. During the period from 2000 to 2014, a distinct set of factors influenced the expansion in the service sector employment share—the average number of years of schooling, GDP per capita, female labor force participation, and the degree of urbanization. In contrast, increased wage inequality tended to inhibit the growth of the service sector as a share of total employment.”

    Link to the summary. (Stay tuned for an essay on this work forthcoming on the Phenomenal World.)

    ‡ service_sector employment 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.

    + + +

    • This week marked the announcement of the Compton Pledge, the largest city-based guaranteed income initiative in the US, led by Compton Mayor Aja Brown in partnership with JFI and the Fund for Guaranteed Income. View the press release here, and a story in the Los Angeles Times here.
    • For more on this new pilot, join us on Tuesday, October 27 at 6 pm EST for the next Social Wealth Seminar featuring Aja Brown, Mayor of Compton. Mayor Brown will present on “The Compton Pledge: An Economic Resilience Strategy for Strengthening Community in Compton.” Link to the website. RSVP to sws-reservations@jainfamilyinstitute.org
    • We are hiring for a full-time Vice President of Strategy & Operations to assist with the management of JFI’s projects. Link to the job description. Link to the job description.
    • “The most important predictors of which cities were hardest hit by the pandemic are exogenous characteristics such as population and density.” A new NBER working paper examines temporal and geographic variation in the early US Covid pandemic. Link.
    • Rodrigo Custodio Urban and Liane Yuri Kondo Nakada use GIS-based modeling to analyze Covid deaths in São Paulo. Link.
    • “We found that, regardless of the source of the information, recommendations for behavioral changes decreased individuals’ willingness to take personal actions to reduce greenhouse gases, decreased willingness to support proclimate candidates, reduced belief in the accelerated speed of climate change, and decreased trust in climate scientists.” By Risa Palm, Toby Bolsen, and Justin T. Kingsland. Link. Last month, NPR covered oil and gas companies’ misleading, multimillion dollar campaign to encourage plastic recycling. Link.
    • Pelin Demirel, Ekaterina Nemkova, and Rebecca Taylor on global inequalities between online freelancers. Link.
    • “City-level minimum wages seem to be able to tailor the policy to local economic environment without imposing substantial distortions in allocation of labor and businesses across locations.” By Arindrajit Dube and Attila S. Linder. Link.
    • “After a year of turmoil, political repression, and corruption, Bolivians overwhelmingly voted back into office the same progressive political party that was ousted a year ago.” By Linda Farthing. Link. And Pablo Stefanoni on the challenges of the new MAS government. Link.
    • “Whaling during the era of Dutch dominance was an ‘open access fishery.’ Was the extinction of the Bowhead whale, therefore, an example of the ‘tragedy of the commons’? Could regulation designed to solve the problem of open access have saved the whales? We show that the issue is complex. Although regulation was a necessary condition for saving the whales, it was not sufficient. Regulations designed to prevent excess entry and rent dissipation would have saved the whales under the static and ahistorical assumptions typically made in the resource management literature. These assumptions include the single regulatory objective of profit maximization, perfect foresight into the indefinite future, and the indefinite maintenance of a regulatory regime once it is put in place—policy updating, in other words, is precluded. However, when other objectives such as the maintenance of employment are allowed or when policy is revised in the light of new information, the stock of whales once again begins to decline. The trend toward extinction is less rapid than under open-access conditions, but it is inexorable even when the industry is regulated.” By Robert C. Allen and Ian Keay. Link.

  5. Change Point

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    HEALTHCARE & UNIONS

    Explanations for the absence of a universal healthcare program in the United States tend to focus on the obstructive role of the American Medical Association, which, via an extensive lobbying campaign, prevented the passage of a national health insurance plan in 1945. Much less attention has been paid to the diverging and often contradictory interests of organized labor during this period.

    In her 2006 book, JILL QUADAGNO considers the relationship between industrial policy and healthcare reform, analyzing how the labor movement came to unify behind private insurance providers by the late 1940s.

    From the text:

    “Although Taft-Hartley outlawed independent, union-run welfare funds through a provision that employers had to share equally in the administration of any pension or health plan, it had left unresolved the issue of whether employers had to bargain over fringe benefits. In 1948 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that fringe benefits were subject to collective bargaining, a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court. Then in 1949 the Wage Stabilization Board, whose job was to keep inflation from wage increases under control, determined that fringe benefits were not inflationary. With many options for increasing membership closed off, union leaders made bargaining for fringe benefits a top priority. Fringe benefits became organized labor’s key strategy for recruiting and retaining members. Over half of strikes in 1949 and 70 percent in 1950 were over this issue.

    Between 1946 and 1957 the number of workers covered by negotiated health insurance plans rose from 1 million to 12 million, plus an additional 20 million dependents. Close to 95 percent of industrial workers represented by the CIO were covered, compared to only 20 percent of skilled craft workers affiliated with the AFL. As for national health insurance, most industrial unionists now ‘gave [it] only lip service.’ Private health insurance ‘had taken the heat off.’ The expansion of private health benefits divided the working class into those who had health insurance and those who did not, and it transformed the way organized labor mobilized politically. Instead of requiring leaders who could inspire the troops to stand by the barricades, the labor movement needed leaders who could master complex financial instruments. The next battle would be won by policy experts with calculators, not charismatic militants who could issue a call to arms.”

    Link to the book.

    • “Labor unions, senior citizens, socialists, and other groups have certainly participated in campaigns to redesign the health care system, but the campaigns themselves have most often been initiated and run by elite organizations and individuals with little connection to a popular base of support.” Beatrix Hoffman on “Health Care Reform and Social Movements in the United States.” Link.
    • Maryaline Catillon, David M. Cutler, and Thomas E. Getzen analyze US healthcare provision since 1800. Link.
    • “By the early 20th century, Britain had a strong civil service and competing, programmatically oriented political parties. However, the contemporary United States lacked an established civil bureaucracy and was embroiled in the efforts of Progressive reformers to create regulatory agencies and policies free of the ‘political corruption’ of 19th century patronage democracy.” Ann Shola Orloff and Theda Skocpol compare healthcare provision in the US and UK. Link. And a 2011 article by Howard Glennerster and Robert C. Lieberman argues that “there are more parallels and points of tangency between the two systems than are readily apparent.” Link.
    ‡ healthcare unions insurance

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Family leave policy and labor market participation

    PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Oregon LUCIANA ETCHEVERRY studies development and labor economics. In a 2020 paper, Etcheverry examines the labor market outcomes of a family policy in Uruguay that allows new parents to receive full-time pay for half-time work.

    From the paper:

    “I study the introduction of a novel form of family policy implemented in Uruguay in 2014: A subsidy that allows parents employed in the formal-private sector to work half-time while receiving full-time pay, from the time maternity leave ends, and until the child is 6 months old. Even though both mother and father can alternate access to the parental care subsidy, in practice, approximately 98 percent of beneficiaries at any given month are women, highlighting an extreme gender gap in utilization. I leverage the fact that public sector workers and informal workers do not have access to the new subsidy and thus can serve as a control group within the sample of employed mothers of infants. I find that mothers are more likely to be employed following the implementation of the parental care subsidy in the short and medium-term. This effect is driven by an increase in the likelihood of being employed in the formal-private sector, specially by disadvantaged mothers (those who are less educated). Mothers of young children employed in the formal-private sector have a significant increase in income and job experience compared to mother of young children employed in other sectors. However, the policy seems to not affect hours worked. Overall, this study provides novel evidence that extensions of flexibilities after birth in the form of fully paid half-time employment causes higher labor force attachment for female workers in the short and medium-term, specially for disadvantaged mothers.”

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

    ‡ family_leave labor_market 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.

    + + +

    • “Rather than proposing individual rights of payment or exit, data governance should be envisioned as a project of collective democratic obligation that seeks to secure those of representation instead.” New on the blog: Salomé Viljoen examines two dominant proposals for data governance. Link.
    • Join us on Friday, October 23 at 6 pm ET for our monthly research session, featuring Alan Rubel, Clinton Castro, and Adam Pham on democratic obligations and technological threats to legitimacy. RSVP to editorial@jainfamilyinstitute.org.
    • In cased you missed Phenomenal World’s event on automation, waged life, and post-scarcity, co-sponsored by n+1 and Dissent Magazine, watch it here. Aaron Benanav discussed his new book, Automation and the Future of Work, with Tim Barker in a conversation moderated by Katrina Forrester.
    • “This study comprehensively defines monetary architecture and presents a macrofinancial model of the Eurozone architecture.” Steffen Murau on monetary architecture and the global offshore US-dollar system. Link.
    • A new report from the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection found that 45% of NYC households can’t pay for a $400 emergency expense with cash and 11% are unbanked. Link.
    • “This research examines how the exogenous shock of the U.S. prohibition of the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol in 1920 restructured power and inequality in Chicago organized crime.” By Chris M. Smith. Link.
    • In a new NBER working paper, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman revise estimates on US income and wealth inequality, responding to claims that inequality has not grown as quickly as previously suggested. Link. In another paper, Saez and Zucman analyze inequality through distributional macroeconomic accounts. Link.
    • Paddy Ireland documents the history of the shareholder-oriented joint stock corporation. Link.
    • “I combine a full century of census data with archival data to show that cities the Home Owners Loan Corporation appraised became more segregated than those it ignored.” Jacob W. Faber on the consequences of the New Deal. Link.
    • Narendra Subramanian compares political mobilizations in the 20th century by Dalits in India and African Americans in the United States. Link.
    • Elena Prager and Matt Schmitt on the effects of hospital mergers on worker wage growth. Link.
    • “We provide evidence that individuals substitute between political contributions and charitable contributions.” By Maria Petrova, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Andrei, Simonov, and Pinar Yildrim. Link.
    • A recent article by Ivan Boldyrev examines a Soviet research group that made a turn to the study of rational choice theory, mechanism design, formal political theory and other then-burgeoning “Western” economic theories. Link.
    • “Since cotton was a key export of the Near East, and of crucial significance in the world economy, analyzing its trade, as well as the evolution of its prices in different markets, helps us understand the nature of the relationship between the Near East and the global market. In the nineteenth century, cotton played a pivotal role in the world economy because it was a key raw material during the Industrial Revolution. Cotton became ‘the core input of the world’s most important manufacturing industry, in terms of amount of labor employed, value of output, and profitability.’ I consider two regions of the Near East, Western Anatolia, and Egypt, the former located at the core of the Ottoman Empire, the latter at its periphery. This study aims to assess whether the extent of cotton market integration in the Near East improved or worsened over time and also to connect changes in the nature of spatial market integration between these markets to major economic and political developments.” By Laura Panza. Link.

  6. Supermoon

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    RENTAL HOUSING

    With millions facing housing insecurity, the economic downturn has sparked concerns of a new housing crisis. Where the subprime mortgage crisis thrust the centrality of unsustainable housing financing practices in the global economy into view, the Covid-19 recession has brought increased attention to widespread housing insecurity among the roughly forty-three million renter households in the US. And these units, too, are increasingly financialized.

    A 2017 article by geographer DESIREE FIELDS examines these trends with a focus on New York City:

    “Rental housing today constitutes an important new node for financializing projects globally, most noticeably in the US single-family market, as well as Spain and Ireland. Private equity funds have taken advantage of sharp price drops, surging rental demand and constrained mortgage credit to buy distressed real estate assets, convert them into rental housing and roll out novel rent-backed financial instruments. Tenants’ homes may be subject to financialization even though residents themselves do not have mortgages.

    Whereas private equity firms only discovered single-family rental post-2008, they had established themselves in New York City’s rental market in the years leading up to the crisis. New York has been characterized as a testing ground for neoliberal urban restructuring, experimentation made possible by its 1970s fiscal crisis. Three decades later, the city’s mid-2000s real estate boom, together with the incomplete dismantling of postwar-era state rent protections in the 1990s, created the conditions for another round of experimentation: private equity firms, in concert with local banks and landlords, set about transforming the city’s rent-regulated housing into a novel asset class for capital seeking investment opportunities, subjecting tenants to harassment, displacement and unsafe living conditions to extract financial yield. This experiment represents an important step towards incorporating rental housing into global circuits of capital.”

    Link to the piece.

    • In another paper, Fields and co-authors Rajkumar Kohli and Alex Schafran trace the growth of single-family rental securitization in the US post-2008. Link.
    • Joe Beswick et al. document the rise of corporate landlords in post-crisis London’s rental market. Link. Manuel B. Aalbers and Andrej Holm compare privatized social housing in Amsterdam and Berlin. Link. Michael Byrne examines asset-management companies and financialized real estate in Ireland. Link.
    • For more on the financialization of real estate, see Herman Mark Schwartz’s work linking the US housing market and global capital flows. Link. See also: Saskia Sassen on mortgages, and David Harvey on capital and urbanization. Link, and link.
    ‡ housing finance rent

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    International aid and activism in Syria

    PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University RANA B. KHOURY studies conflict, displacement, and humanitarianism in the Middle East. In a 2017 article, Khoury examines international aid and the changing landscape of activism around the Syrian conflict.

    From the article:

    “Despite the dizzying truth of the violence, a more careful consideration of Syria’s warscape—that place of transformative social processes in and around a warzone—uncovers evidence of continued unarmed mobilization among civilians. Indeed, refugees in neighboring countries like Jordan are deeply engaged in humanitarian, developmental, and political endeavors. Still, the overwhelming militarism and humanitarianism that have characterized the Syrian crisis have had their impacts: activist organization is constricted and configured by security imperatives and, paradoxically, by the aid regime assisting civilians in the conflict. In turn, activism has evolved from grassroots mobilization to a formal and aid-based response to a humanitarian crisis. The informal and formal ‘everyday elements’ of intervention—social habits, bureaucratic procedures, approaches to data—impact these massive enterprises from the bottom up. In response to Syria, politics is displaced by ‘governance,’ rebels by ‘proscribed’ versus ‘vetted’ groups, constituents by ‘beneficiaries,’ survival by ‘stipends,’ and so on. Through discourse and ways of knowing the world, the system discerns technical problems to be resolved by technocrats, thereby ‘depoliticizing everything it touches.”

    Link to the piece, link to Khoury’s website.

    ‡ conflict NGO 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.

    + + +

    • Join us on Thursday October 15 at 3pm ET for a conversation between Aaron Benanav and Tim Barker, co-hosted with n+1: Automation, Waged Life, and Post-Scarcity. Link to the registration page. (And link to Benanav’s Phenomenal World piece from earlier in the year.)
    • And on Tuesday October 13 at 6pm ET, the next iteration of JFI’s Social Wealth Seminar series will feature Jonathan Calenzani on bond yields amid low global growth rates. Email sws-reservations@jainfamilyinstitute.org to register, and see more about the series here.
    • “We don’t just want to think about ameliorative policies, we want to think about building things into the economy that fundamentally restructure political and economic interactions.” On the blog, Álvaro Guzmán Bastida interviews Mark Blyth on Covid-19, public anger, and three generations of global capitalism. Link.
    • “We argue that rising rents may induce redistribution of income between capital and labour without price changes.” New research by Mariana Mazzucato, Josh Ryan-Collins, and Giorgos Gouzoulis develops a “framework for understanding how rising modern economic rents are related to increasing inequality and declining investment and innovation, and secular stagnation.” Link.
    • A new Equitable Growth report by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Alix Gould-Werth looks at the relationship between unions and unemployment insurance: “greater access to unmployment insurance supports workplace collective action, which, in turn, supports greater access to unemployment benefits.” Link.
    • Ariel Ron on “Monetary Democracy” in American history. Link. See also: Noam Maggor and Anton Jäger on Populists and the Federal Reserve. Link.
    • Markus Goldstein interviews Rachael Pierotti on mixed methods research. Link. h/t Sidhya
    • A new paper by Barbara Biasi and Heather Sarsons looks at the 2011 erosion of collective bargaining for Wisconsin school teachers to “show that flexible pay increased the gender pay gap among teachers with the same credentials.” Link.
    • Brishen Rogers on labor law and technological change. Link.
    • “Over the course of the sixteenth century, Europeans writing about the ius gentium went from treating indigenous American rulers as the juridical equals of Europe’s princes to depicting them as little more than savage brutes, incapable of bearing dominium and ineligible for the protections of the law of peoples. This transformation resulted from fundamental changes in European society and provided a new foundation for imperial expansion into the Americas.” By Daragh Grant. Link.
    • “A tale of three depressions.” Paul De Grauwe and Yuemi Ji on the Covid-19 economic collapse. Link. (And link to Eichengreen and O’Rourke’s “Tale of two depressions.”)
    • “Complaints to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are correlated with deaths 17 days later.” W.P. Hanage, C. Testa, J. T. Chen, L. Davis, E. Pechter, M Santillana and N. Krieger report on the unique weaknesses of the US response to the Covid-19 crisis: failure to prevent community spread; poor labor protections; excess mortality. Link.
    • A new PIIE report by Chad Brown on US export controls and the semiconductor race. Link.
    • “Among mobile hunter-gatherers during the late Pleistocene, food was almost certainly widely shared as it was acquired. If a harvested crop or the meat of a domesticated animal were to have been distributed to other group members, a late Pleistocene would-be farmer would have had little incentive to engage in the required investments in clearing, cultivation, animal tending, and storage. However, the new property rights that farming required—secure individual claims to the products of one’s labor—were infeasible because most of the mobile and dispersed resources of a forager economy could not cost-effectively be delimited and defended. The resulting chicken-and-egg puzzle might be resolved if farming had been much more productive than foraging, but initially it was not. Recent estimates suggest that the productivity of the first farmers (calories per hour of labor including processing and storage) was probably less than that of the foragers they eventually replaced, perhaps by a considerable amount. The Holocene revolution was not sparked by a superior technology. It occurred because possession of the wealth of farmers—crops, dwellings, and animals—could be unambiguously demarcated and defended. This facilitated the spread of new property rights that were advantageous to the groups adopting them.” By Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi. Link.

  7. Adoration of the Calf

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    PRESIDENTIALISM

    Recent weeks have seen proliferating analyses of the constitutional infrastructure of the US, and speculation over its ability to hinder the behaviors of a disruptive incumbent. New concerns reflect longstanding apprehension over the stability of presidential regimes.

    A 1990 article by sociologist JUAN JOSE LINZ offers insight into the structural limitations of presidential systems, and their political consequences.

    “Presidential constitutions incorporate contradictory principles and assumptions. On the one hand, such systems set out to create a strong, stable executive with enough plebiscitarian legitimation to stand fast against the array of particular interests represented in the legislature. Interest group conflict then bids fair to manifest itself in areas other than the strictly political. On the other hand, presidential constitutions also reflect profound suspicion of the personalization of power. The fundamental contradiction between the desire for a strong and stable executive and the latent suspicion of that same presidential power affects political decision making, the style of leadership, the political practices, and the rhetoric of both presidents and their opponents in presidential systems. It introduces a dimension of conflict that cannot be explained wholly by socioeconomic, political, or ideological circumstances.

    Among the oft-cited advantages of presidentialism is its provision for the stability of the executive. This feature is said to furnish a welcome contrast to the tenuousness of many parliamentary governments, with their frequent cabinet crises and changes of prime minister. But the superficial volatility of parliamentary systems obscures the continuity of parties in power, the enduring character of coalitions, and the way that party leaders and key ministers have of weathering cabinet crises without relinquishing their posts. Precisely by virtue of their surface instability, they often avoid deeper crises. An embattled president can use his powers in such a way that his opponents might not be willing to wait until the end of his term to oust him, but there are no constitutional ways-save impeachment or resignation under pressure-to replace him. There are, moreover, risks attached even to these entirely legal methods; the incumbent’s supporters may feel cheated by them and rally behind him, thus exacerbating the crisis. The intense antagonisms underlying such crises cannot remain even partially concealed in the corridors and cloakrooms of the legislature. What in a parliamentary system would be a government crisis can become a full-blown regime crisis in a presidential system.”

    Link to the piece.

    • “Parliamentary constitutions in Europe emerged after a gradual period of negotiation between the monarch and the nobles, in which the parliament ultimately displaced the monarchy as the center of effective governance. In Latin America, by contrast, initial governments, whether revolutionary or not, emerged from a system of monarchy in which a single individual sat at the center of the political system.” Jose Antonio Cheibub, Zachary Elkins and Tom Ginsburg with a comparative history of presidentialism in Latin America. Link. In another paper, the authors find that “the classic presidential-parliamentary distinction is not a systemic one.” Link.
    • Thomas Sidelius examines the historical-institutional factors behind the adoption of semi-presidential systems in post-communist countries across Central and Eastern Europe. Link.
    • A 2012 article by Paul Chaisty, Nic Cheeseman and Timothy Power analyzes “how presidents build legislative coalitions in different regional contexts,” focusing on the role of agenda power, budgetary authority, cabinet management, partisan powers, and informal institutions in shaping political relations in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union. Link.
    ‡ politics elections presidentialism

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Voter responsiveness to New Deal policy and outcomes

    PhD Candidate in Political Science at UCLA BRIAN T. HAMEL examines the relationships between the distribution of state provisioning programs and political outcomes. His job market paper accounts for a distinction between policy and outcomes, in the context of New Deal economic relief programs.

    From the abstract:

    “The theory of retrospective voting predicts that voters are responsive to policy outcomes, but not the policies, programs, and provisions that may have produced those outcomes. I reevaluate this claim. Using a difference-indifferences design, I show that counties that received more New Deal economic relief money became more Democratic than counties that received less money regardless of changes in local macroeconomic conditions. Additionally, I find that voters were particularly responsive to direct financial assistance programs relative to economic stimulus spending, as well as suggestive evidence that the media facilitated these policy-based voting responses. Finally, while the effects of economic change are transient, the effects of New Deal spending on Democratic support in presidential elections have persisted through to today. My results suggest that voters reward and punish incumbents not just for policy ends, but for policy, too.”

    Link to the piece, link to Hamel’s website.

    ‡ politics new_deal 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.

    + + +

    • “America’s agrarian radicals formulated bold visions of central banking wielded by the people, as an instrument of capital allocation, developmental state policies, and ultimately a transformed political economy.” On the blog, Anton Jäger and Noam Maggor outline a Populist vision of the Fed. Link.
    • We are hiring for two fellowship positions: one to work with Marshall Steinbaum on research in our higher education project, the other to work on communications for a new guaranteed income initiative. Link to the opportunities page.
    • “Will resetting the poverty line mean that more Americans will be counted as having resources below it? Yes, but that’s only because a reasonable reset will provide a more accurate picture of who is economically deprived by today’s standards, not those of 1963.” Shawn Fremsted’s extensive look at the OPM, the SPM, and how poverty metrics shape policy. Link.
    • At VoxEU, Gordon Liao and Tony Zhang on dollar swap line usage during the Covid-19 pandemic.Link.
    • Yige Dong on how urban Chinese women choose between formal and informal employment. Link.
    • “In August, the real unemployment rate, including all aspects, was 16.8 per cent, or 28.2m unemployed workers, much higher than the official BLS rate of 8.4 per cent. This gulf is consistent with years of data showing that the real unemployment rate is often at least 50 per cent higher than the BLS count.” In the FT, Leo Hindery of the CFR on the limits of BLS unemployment statistics and the “real unemployment rate.” Link. (See also: Bloomberg’s summary of the new employment report, Heidi Shierholz of EPI’s summary, and a follow-up piece to Hindery’s by Claire Jones, on unemployment in the US and the EU.)
    • “Democratizing the Supreme Court.” Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn argue against both personnel reforms and appeals to restoring legitimacy to the court, and in favor of “disempowering reforms like jurisdiction stripping and a supermajority requirement for judicial review, which take power away from the Court.” Link.
    • Taly Reininger and Borja Castro-Serrano examine notions of individualism, merit, and poverty in Chile’s Ethical Family Income, a conditional cash transfer program. Link.
    • A new United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report on the prospects for economic recovery: “The status quo ante, is a goal not worth the name. And the task is urgent, for right now, history is repeating itself, this time with a disturbing mix of both tragedy and farce.” Link.
    • “By mapping tens of millions of global connections in empirical portraits of interrelations between regions, economies, and carbon emissions in 2004, I demonstrate that our understandings of carbon and its geographies are extremely sensitive to which standpoint we adopt.” Luke Bergman on methods and metrics for measuring carbon emissions. Link.
    • Govind Gopakumar on technopolitics, transit and road infrastructure projects, and “the regime of congestion” in Bengaluru, India. Link.
    • “We exploit the payroll, storehouse, purchasing, and admissions records of a large Toledan hospital to identify the gender wage gap between contemporary male and female nurses from 1553 to 1650. Nursing was a non-gendered occupation, as hospitals required that patients be assisted exclusively by nurses of their same gender. We present detailed information on both cash and in-kind compensation and recover the necessary data to accurately estimate the value of the latter. We also use data on the ratio of nurses to patients to show that productivity levels differed little by gender. We find that female compensation fluctuated between 70 percent and 100 percent of male levels and that the hospital responded swiftly to acute episodes of labor scarcity or abundance when setting wages.” By Mauricio Drelichman and David González Agudo. Link.

  8. An Evening, Chapter 32

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    THE SERVICE SECTOR

    It is well known that the share of the global labor force working in services has risen precipitously over the past several decades, with nearly half of all workers around the globe now counted in the service sector. Scholarly work on the source and effects of this transition has risen in tandem, producing attempts to variously project visions of a “knowledge economy” in the global north and account for premature deindustrialization across the global south.

    In a 1992 volume, Jean-Claude Delaunay and Jean Gadrey shed light on the history of services as a concept, with a chronological summary of three centuries of theories of service work. From the introduction:

    “It is difficult to interpret correctly the major characteristics of what has been called the ‘services revolution,’ even though these characteristics are clearly visible. As economic activities, services have appeared fragile and unimportant, not suitable to ensure employment or economic prosperity. Yet services have fundamentally changed economic and social structures.

    The notion of a post-industrial society was particularly popular in the late-1960s because it offered to intellectuals, who were tired of the technocratic power of enterprises and governments, the perspective of an intelligence-based society, which would finally do away with the notion of production for no other purpose than production itself. The services with which we are concerned today are not the same as the ones observed by Adam Smith. They differ in the way they are produced, in their results and in their diversity. Moreover, services, as we know them now, cannot be separated from goods; they are intimately interwoven with production and use. In the 18th and 19th centuries, economists discussed the role of services in society. Today, they study the service society.”

    Link to the book.

    • A 2013 article in the Cambridge Journal of Economics by Guarav Nayyar looks at the “black box” of services in India. Link. In a 1988 commentary paper also in the CJE, Deepak Nayyar examines the political economy of international trade in services. Link.
    • “Little is known about the size of the informal economy either across the service sector as a whole, or in particular service industries, either globally, in particular global regions, or nations.” An overview article by Abbi Kedir, Colin Williams, and Levent Altinay on services and informality introduces a journal issue dedicated to the topic. Link.
    • In a 2008 paper, Fiona Tregenna examines the relationship between manufacturing and services in South Africa, “focussing on the ‘Hirschmanian’ channels through which sectoral growth can lead or support aggregate economic growth.” Link. A 2009 paper by Tregenna looks at services as a concept in the history of Marxian economic thought. Link. (See also a 2018 paper by Tregenna on the question of sectoral analysis and definition more broadly. Link.)
    ‡ service_sector economics growth

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Inclusion in agricultural cooperatives

    Economics PhD candidate at the University of Florida SCOTT MILLER studies development economics, impact evaluation, and agricultural markets. In a 2020 paper, Miller examines women’s livestock cooperatives in rural Nepal.

    From the abstract:

    “Is there a tradeoff between inclusive membership and market performance in agricultural cooperatives? Prior studies argue that inclusive membership practices damage cooperative performance by increasing internal transaction and coordination costs. However, studies on this topic have largely overlooked the extent to which organizational activities are inclusive of existing members. In this paper, I expand the definition of inclusive membership to account for two separate sources of inclusion, extensive and intensive, and examine the inclusive-performance tradeoff across each dimension. Extensive inclusion describes the diversity of a cooperative’s membership, while intensive inclusion describes the extent to which existing members are included in group activities. My results suggest that extensive inclusion is associated with lower market performance, while intensive inclusion is associated with higher market performance. This may suggest that both extensive and intensive inclusion have a meaningful, but opposite, impact on a cooperative’s ability to achieve market performance.”

    Link to the piece, link to Miller’s website.

    ‡ development agriculture 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.

    + + +

    • “Causal methods naturalize the distinction between direct (and thus discriminatory) effects of race and indirect (and thus legitimate) effects of race, creating what looks like a successful way to bootstrap formal statistical or experimental methods into substantive moral and political judgments.” On the blog, Lily Hu on causal reasoning about racial discrimination. Link.
    • JFI released a congressional district-level interactive map detailing student debt burdens, costs, and access. The new map, which can be used by constituents to track the debt crisis in their districts, follows the release of the third report on millennial student debt. Link to the map, link to the report.
    • A new paper by Kai Koddenbrock, Ingrid Kvangraven, and Ndongo Samba Sylla takes a long view of the finance-production nexus in Senegal and Ghana. Link.
    • “Implementing all feasible interventions reduced plastic pollution by 40% from 2016 rates and 78% relative to ‘business as usual’ in 2040. Even with immediate and concerted action, 710 million metric tons of plastic waste cumulatively entered aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.” A paper in Science models interventions towards zero plastic pollution. By Winnie Lau, Yonathan Shiran, Richard M. Bailey et al. Link.
    • Mary Brazelton on China’s project of mass immunization during the Second Sino-Japanese war. Link.
    • “China is focusing its post-Covid recovery on high-carbon energy and infrastructure, as it did after the 2008-9 global financial crisis.” Lauri Myllyvirta and Yedan Li on the energy implications of China’s recovery spending, in the light of Xi Jinping’s announcement that China would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Link.
    • “Moral panics surrounding the prevalence of migrant workers in platform work in turn shape how platform workers are regulated by the state, and also the development of the platform model itself.” Link to Dalia Gebrial’s contribution to Autonomy’s collection of research on platform firms.
    • Christian Henderson examines state agricultural land grabs by Gulf nations: “I propose that these projects are part of commodity chains that are articulated to the agribusiness industry in the Gulf states.” Link.
    • “I find that New York City’s key local political actors reacted to [Hurricane Sandy] by shifting the city’s climate politics from a tentative cosmopolitanism emphasizing decarbonization to a defensive parochialism emphasizing adaptation.” Daniel Aldana Cohen on climate disaster and policy. Link.
    • “This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the town of Kastamonu, located in northern Anatolia, in the course of the eighteenth century. Our primary sources of data are the probate estate inventories (terekes) found in the court records (sicils) of this town. We estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini coefficient, the coefficient of variation, and the wealth shares of the top 10 and top 25 percent of estates. Our results show that wealth inequality rose significantly in Kastamonu during the course of the eighteenth century, a pattern that was parallel to those observed in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to widely held presumptions, our results suggest that tax farming did not contribute to the rise in inequality. The immediate effect of warfare was consistently negative and mostly significant, indicating that consequences of Ottoman wars worked in such a way that the gap between the rich and the poor narrowed.” By Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene. Link.

  9. Shape in the Green

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    SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES

    Since the first export processing zone was established in Puerto Rico during the 1940s, special economic zones (SEZs) have proliferated to number 5,400 across 147 countries and employ more than 100 million workers. While the zones have been lauded for generating economic growth and allowing for infant industry development, recent work has documented their concerning impact on labor markets and domestic regulatory frameworks.

    In a recently published book chapter, PATRICK NEVELING analyzes the history of SEZs throughout the postwar period:

    “The Roosevelt administration injected significant sums of money into Puerto Rican infrastructure after 1934, in response to massive strikes and riots across all economic sectors on the island. From the 1940s onward, Puerto Rico set up three crucial institutions: a planning board that oversaw the implementation of industrial standards, a development bank that supplied new industries with capital, and a parastatal development corporation that managed new import-substitution industries. However, the import-substitution phase in Puerto Rico was to be short-lived. Five years after those factories had opened in 1942, Puerto Rico lured mainland manufacturers with tax holidays and financial subsidies to relocate their production. As the Puerto Rican export-oriented industrialization programme coincided with the beginning of US international development aid for pro-capitalist allies across the Third World, the Truman administration’s Point Four programme made extensive use of the island’s success story. Thousands of officials from postcolonial nations were flown in and other European colonial powers in the Caribbean were pushed to embrace similar programmes.

    The World Bank and IMF made EPZs an integral part of the many structural adjustment programmes that postcolonial nations had to sign up to during the 80s debt crisis. Subsequently many other nations across the world would sign SAPs and be forced to privatize national industries and establish tripartite institutions of the Puerto Rican kind, with national standard boards that now oversee compliance with the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO norms series, national development banks, and development organizations with private-sector majorities on executive boards. Why did Western nations promote SEZ in developing nations even though heart-lands of textile and garment production in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere went into rapid decline with deindustrialization? Emerging multinational corporations in the textile and garment sector and later also in consumer electronics, automobile production, and so forth could use their increased and low-risk capital mobility to play off manufacturing locations against one another by forcing trade unions to accept wage cuts in exchange for relocation waivers.”

    Link to the piece.

    • “While EPZs have flourished as a vehicle for globalized production, as an employer strategy for low-cost exports, and as a governmental strategy to absorb surplus labour and attract FDI, they have failed to create decent jobs.” A 2011 ILO report by Jamie K. McCallum offers a comparative review of labor market impacts of EPZs in China, Honduras, Nicaragua and South Africa. Link.
    • Nathalie Picarelli on the distributional impacts of export processing zones in Nicaragua: “the policy benefited the upper-tail the most.” Link.
    • Another piece by Neveling analyzes “Free Trade Zones, Export Processing Zones, Special Economic Zones and Global Imperial Formations 200 BCE to 2015 CE. Link.
    ‡ development isi growth

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Demographic Disparities and Flood Response

    Post-doctoral fellow at NYU’s Institute for Policy Integrity ANA VARELA VARELA studies sustainable development, flooding, and flood resilience globally. In a 2019 paper, she analyzes how income disparities impact economic recovery in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

    From the article:

    “Using evidence from property sales in four US states affected by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, combined with buyers’ demographics, I find that flooded properties in neighborhoods with high preexisting income had more high-income white buyers and higher sale prices than comparable non-flooded coastal properties, seemingly capitalizing on the flood and offsetting average drops. Using machine learning algorithms, I corroborate that of a rich set of preexisting place characteristics, neighborhood income best discriminates between most positively and most negatively affected properties. As coastal flooding is forecasted to increase, these results improve our understanding of the heterogenous impacts of floods, and on the existence of adaptive behavior, or lack thereof, after flooding. In some places, lower property prices and changes in neighborhood demographics after flood can speed the process of urban decay. The resulting community post-flood may have less capacity to economically respond or bound back after the inevitable next storm, or even evacuate in case of immediate danger. This dynamic could lead to the entrenchment of pockets of social vulnerability along an increasingly risky shoreline. In other places, flood properties increase in value post-flood. For these, insurance rate discounts based on property construction year and location could actually serve as regressive subsidies for high-income households.”

    Link to the piece, link to Varela Varela’s website.

    ‡ climate insurance 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.

    + + +

    • New JFI report & interactive map present one of the most comprehensive datasets on higher ed debt by income, race, and age since 2009: “We found that all young borrowers are saddled with dramatically rising debt since 2009, but low-income groups, BIPOC, and those in their 30s fare worse than others. While richer students have higher absolute debt, low-income students experience massive and growing relative debt burdens. And students in majority-Black and Hispanic zip codes have seen larger debt increases than those in majority-white zip codes.” Link to the report, link to the map.
    • Abhay Aneja and Guo Xu “link personnel records of the federal civil service to census data for 1907-1921 to study the segregation of the civil service by race under President Woodrow Wilson.” Link.
    • “We need to stop seeing growth as an end in itself, but rather as a means to achieving societal goals including environmental sustainability, reduced inequality, greater wellbeing and improved resilience.” A new OECD report urges policymakers to look “Beyond Growth.” Link.
    • “Rather than a consequence of excessive concentration of power within the executive, authoritarian practices were adopted by a spectrum of conservative societal institutions.” Niels Søndergaard on authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil. Link.
    • “For e-car batteries and energy storage alone, Europe will need up to 18 times more lithium by 2030 and up to 60 times more by 2050.” Diego Francesco Marin on Europe’s scramble for raw materials. Link. For more on resource extraction, see Phenomenal World’s report from earlier this year. h/t Francis
    • A new AI Now report asseses India’s Aadhaar biometric identity project. Link
    • Two new reports on income inequality: one from the Census Bureau, and one from the RAND Corporation. Link and link. CEPR’s Shawn Fremstad notes: “The poverty line used by the Census Bureau is much lower than the amount of income most Americans say is needed in today’s America.” Link to his full statement.
    • “Although left-wing actors operate primarily through offline protest, right-wing activists manipulate legacy media, migrate to alternative platforms, and work strategically with partisan media to spread their messages.” Deen Freelon, Alice Marwick, and Daniel Kreiss on online activism. Link.
    • Manuel Bellanger et. al survey analytical frameworks for cross-sector conflicts over marine and coastal governance. Link.
    • “We analyse ancient proteins from human dental calculus recovered from geographically diverse locations across Mongolia and spanning 5,000 years. We present the earliest evidence for dairy consumption on the eastern Eurasian steppe by circa 3000 BC and the later emergence of horse milking at circa 1200 BC, concurrent with the first evidence for horse riding. We argue that ruminant dairying contributed to the demographic success of Bronze Age Mongolian populations and that the origins of traditional horse dairy products in eastern Eurasia are closely tied to the regional emergence of mounted herding societies during the late second millennium BC.” By Shevan Wilkin et. al. Link.

  10. Technological Improvements

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    FINANCE AND FARMLAND

    Land acquisitions have been on the rise since 2008, when rising oil prices and an international food crisis dramatically increased demand. Changing ownership patterns have the potential to influence not only the terms of agricultural supply chains, but the structure of political power in economies across the Global South.

    A new book by MADELEINE FAIRBAIRN analyzes the trajectory of global land grabs, focusing especially on the expanding role of the financial sector.

    From the introduction:

    “The giant US pension fund Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), one of the largest players in the emerging farmland investment sector, illustrates how recently financial interest in farmland has emerged—and how rapidly it has grown. In 2007, TIAA suddenly began acquiring enormous tracts of farmland as part of the investment portfolio it manages on behalf of retired teachers and other professionals. By 2012, it already controlled $2.8 billion worth of farmland in the United States, Australia, Brazil, and Eastern Europe, making it one of the largest farmland owners and managers in the world. This included more than four hundred individual farm properties totaling 600,000 acres, most of them leased out to tenant farmers and operating companies. By the end of 2017, less than a decade after its first farmland purchase, TIAA—a firm created to manage the retirement accounts of teachers—had come to control over 1.9 million acres of farmland worldwide.

    The amount of financial-sector capital so far invested in global farmland markets is fairly paltry. But financial-sector spittle has the potential to buy a lot of land. In Iowa, where farmland cost an average of $7,943 per acre in 2014, $40 billion could buy slightly over 5 million acres—approximately a sixth of the state’s farmland. In Brazil’s soy frontier state of Piauí, where farmland cost around $1,000 an acre in 2014, it would buy well over half the state. Ultimately, the prospect of landownership concentration in the hands of the financial sector matters because it has the potential to propel economic inequality. It matters greatly if the financial institutions that control much of the accumulated wealth of society decide that land is a preferred route for storing that wealth and generating income from it.”

    Link to the book.

    • “We devised a new methodology for uncovering corporate organization and actors who benefit from farmland investment through an analysis of creditors and proprietors.” Loka Ashwood, John Canfield, Madeleine Fairbairn and Kathryn De Master draw on county-level tax parcel data to analyze corporate land ownership structures in Illinois. Link.
    • International investment law, which construes land as a commercial asset, can facilitate access to land for foreign investors and impose discipline on the exercise of regulatory powers in land matters. But shifts in the political economy that underpins international investment law can create new opportunities to reflect the non-commercial relations within which land rights remain embedded in many societies.” Lorenzo Cotula’s 2013 article on the legal underpinnings of global land acquisition. By the same author, a 2013 book looks at landgrabs across Africa. Link, link.
    • Another new book by Stefan Ouma presents an ethnography of agricultural-focussed asset management, through case studies of New Zealand and Tanzania. Link.
    ‡ land finance agriculture

    NEW RESEARCHERS

    Care work and ethnic group boundaries in South Korea

    Recent University of Toronto sociology PhD graduate YANG-SOOK KIM studies the effects of globalization in the care sector in the US and South Korea. In a 2018 paper, Kim analyzes the complex relationship between labor market stratification and ethnicity among elderly care workers in South Korea.

    From the article:

    “The predominance of migrant workers on the bottom of South Korea’s care labour market is commonly viewed as a natural outcome of an emerging regional care chain and an ethnocentric immigration regime that selectively brings migrant workers into the nation’s care markets. However, the interaction between policy discourses and the subjectivities of migrant and native-born care workers reveals a complex story. Unlike South Korean women who work as yoyangbohosa (state-certified eldercare workers), most Korean-Chinese migrant Joseonjok workers in the care sector are not state-certified and work informally as patients’ aides and domestic workers. It is crucial to analyze the role of policy regimes in reproducing existing divisions and hierarchies between similar yet unequally positioned groups of marginalized workers. In this article, I examine the boundary marking strategies of native-born and migrant care workers in South Korea to better understand how each group makes sense of and navigates the dynamics of ethnically-segmented care labour markets.”

    Link to the full paper.

    ‡ labor_market migration 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.

    + + +

    • Join us Tuesday September 15 at 6pm ET for another installment of JFI’s Social Wealth Seminar, featuring Marcelo Medeiros on a proposal for a permanent and countercyclical system for social protection in Latin America. Email sws-reservations@jainfamilyinstitute.org to register, and read Medeiros’ “Plan for the Poorest” here.
    • “Using ethnographic data of doctors applying for maternity leave in Pakistan, this article documents strategies used by citizens to navigate administrative burden.” A new paper by Ayesha Masood and Muhammad Azfar Nisar. Link. For more on administrative burden, see this newsletter from last year.
    • “Value added per ton of raw material embodied in exports is 11 times higher in high-income countries than in those with the lowest income, and 28 times higher per unit of embodied labor.” A new paper provides “empirical evidence that supports the theory of ecologically unequal exchange.” By Christian Dorninger, Alf Hornborg, David J. Abson, Henrik von Wehrden, Anke Schaffartzik, et al. Link.
    • “The relationship between industrial worker campaigns and democratization is very robust, whereas the evidence is mixed for middle-class campaigns for democracy.” Sirianne Dahlum, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Tore Wig on the social composition of antiregime movements, from 1900 – 2006. Link.
    • On the political effects of misreported Swedish balance of payments statistics in the 1970s, by Gunnar Blomberg, Lars Forss, and Ingvar Karlsson. Link.
    • “Forecasts by economists of the economic damage from climate change have been notably sanguine compared to warnings by scientists about damage to the biosphere. This is because economists made their own predictions of damages, using three spurious methods: assuming that about 90% of GDP will be unaffected by climate change, because it happens indoors; using the relationship between temperature and GDP today as a proxy for the impact of global warming over time; and using surveys that diluted extreme warnings from scientists with optimistic expectations from economists.” Steve Keen on climate modeling. Link.
    • Robert M. Feinberg and Daniel Kuehn find that a guaranteed basic income program in Alaska had positive effects on entrepreneurship that dissipated over time. Link.
    • “Underlining the significant role of caste in defining the educational experiences of Dalit students, the findings underscore that the emergence of class along caste lines, the different face of patriarchy for Dalit females, and the inaccessibility of affirmative action due to daily financial challenges, make the process of inclusion still a distant dream.” Kamlesh Narwana and Angrej Singh Gill on Dalit higher education in Punjab. Link.
    • Israel García Solares analyzes working class formations through simultaneous miner strikes in the US and Mexico in the early 20th century. Link.
    • On Baumol and Engel effects in the structural transformation of the Japanese economy, 1885 – 1985. By Kyoji Fukao and Saumik Paul. Link.
    • “Employing droughts and floods to proxy for changes in precipitation, this paper shows nomadic incursions into settled Han Chinese regions over a period of more than two thousand years—the most enduring clash of civilizations in history—to be positively correlated with less rainfall and negatively correlated with more rainfall. Consistent with findings that economic shocks are positively correlated with conflicts in modern sub-Saharan Africa when instrumented by rainfall, our reduced-form results extend this relationship to a very different temporal and geographical context, the Asian continent, and long historical period.” By Ying Bai and James Kai-sing Kung. Link.