Political Economy

This paper asks whether patrimonial hiring in colonial contexts can originate with local bureaucrats rather than political principals. Using newly digitized personnel records from six decades of British rule in Ghana, the authors examine patterns of hiring for African staff and assess whether meritocratic or patrimonial rules prevailed. The study contributes to debates about early state-building by highlighting bureaucrats’ potential agency in shaping personnel choices, especially where political leaders were socially distant from governed communities.

This article argues that the foreign-policy issues emphasized by individual embassies are shaped by where diplomats get their information. American Chambers of Commerce (AmChams) — private interest groups of U.S. firms operating in host states — emerged across the 20th and early 21st centuries as key information providers on commercial topics such as tax, trade, and investment regulations.

How Markets Shape Values and Political Preferences: A Field Experiment

This paper asks how to measure bilateral (dyadic) trade dependence in a contemporary world economy characterized by intensive intermediate goods trade and changing availability of partners and substitutes. The authors construct measures from structural-gravity models that quantify (1) how much trade interruptions reduce a country’s welfare and (2) how much additional trade from existing partners would be required to compensate. The brief summarizes the research question, the measurement approach, and the paper’s reported comparisons with traditional aggregate measures.

Examines how post-treatment bias skews efforts to separate economic and cultural drivers of the globalization backlash and whether common "horse-race" regressions can reliably apportion their relative influence on voting.

This study examines how beliefs about corporate America influence the structure of public opinions toward privatization policies. It explores the relationship between generalized trust in corporations and nuanced views on specific privatization initiatives, revealing surprising insights into opinion formation.

Why did poor, agricultural Denmark become a leader in mass public primary education (1814) with multiple tracks including vocational training? And why didn't rich industrial Britain create such systems until 1870?

Why do leaders choose specific tax structures? This article proposes a theory: taxes are shaped by political survival desires.

The debate on optimal political system size persists despite arguments for both small and large units. This article evaluates the economic efficiency argument using a recent Danish reform where 239 municipalities were amalgamated through an exogenous government intervention, allowing analysis without endogeneity concerns.