Dr. Sara Lowes joins us from the University of Bocconi to discuss how matrilineal kinship systems affect spousal cooperation and household welfare in Central Africa. Come along for an insightful discussion at the intersection of development economics and political economy. 

Professor Peter John of the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London sits down with our colleagues this May to discuss his new book, How Far to Nudge?  Join us for an insightful discussion on the history of behavioral economics and how citizens can “nudge” the nudgers back.

How did commitments to socialism influence rule-making in the Indian constitution? What are the governance consequences of the framers’ motivations? Dr. Shruti Rajagopalan of SUNY  Purchase College and NYU joins us for a seminar on the constitutional political economy of Indian politics.

How do experiments in governance help us tackle the challenges of climate change? Which forms of policy-making provide maximal benefits for the environment? Join us for a seminar with Professor Frans Berkhout, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy and Professor of Environment, Society and Climate at King’s College London.

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? How are the origins of property relevant to governance in the 21st century? Join us for a seminar at the intersection of philosophy and experimental economics by Professor Bart Wilson of Chapman University.

Why do developing countries fail to adopt the institutions and policies that promote development? Join us for a seminar by Professor Barry Weingast on his latest work with co-authors Gary Cox and the late Douglass C. North. 

How did British colonial rule alter the relationships between African citizens and their governments?  What are the causes of corruption and bad governance? Join us for a seminar with Dr. Liya Palagashvili, Assistant Professor of Economics at the State University of New York, Purchase College. 

What are the causes of poor governance in Afghanistan? When do states help create wealth and when do they destroy it? Dr. Ilia Murtazashvili joins us from the University of Pittsburgh for a seminar on the causes of government predation. 

What kinds of institutions help facilitate citizens’ acceptance of their rules of governance? In this seminar, Dr Brian Kogelmann of the University of Maryland will discuss how polycentric institutional arrangements in the tradition of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom complement the theory of public reason liberalism. 

How does monitoring technology reduce shirking in the public sector?  In this seminar, Ernesto Dal Bo (University of California, Berkeley) presents new experimental evidence from rural Paraguay. Check out the full NBER paper and join the discussion. 

The standard rationality assumptions of neoclassical economics were consciously adopted as unrealistic. They were designed to create “puppets” that would give utility functions a firm axiomatic foundations and generate determinate market behavior. Behavioral economics treats these puppet characteristics as a normative ideal by which the behavior of real-world individuals is to be judged.

When citizens interact with the state, they encounter street-level bureaucrats—the welfare workers, police officers, counselors and educators responsible for implementing public policy and enforcing the law. By combining political theory with participant observation in a public service agency, Bernardo Zacka (MIT) argues that street-level bureaucrats are caught in a troubling predicament.

Professor Larry Bartels (Vanderbilt) examines the relationship between public opinion and social spending in thirty affluent democracies over the past three decades. He finds that governments’ responsiveness to citizens’ preferences was highly skewed in favor of affluent citizens, who were generally less supportive of the welfare state than poor citizens were. REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

How have post-communist nations in Central and Eastern Europe navigated the dual pressures of attracting FDI and keeping their anti-business and anti-FDI promises to their electorates? Roger Schoenman (UC Santa Cruz) explores the cases of the Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS), Hungary’s Fidesz, Slovakia’s Social Democrats under Robert Fico and Bulgaria’s GERB government.

Space orbit and radio frequency are essential global commons that necessitate governance through co-operation. Nevertheless, with the introduction of mega satellite constellations by private actors (e.g. OneWeb, SpaceX) and the recent dominance of adversarial narratives in space discussions, it has become exceedingly difficult for the international community to ensure the continuous peaceful and sustainable use of outer space resources. Can peace in space be sustained?

Did the English patent system help spark the Industrial Revolution? Most scholars addressing this question have focused on whether patents improved the economic incentive to invent. Professor Gary Cox (Stanford) examines whether patents improved access to useful knowledge. REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

Democracies set policy through broad input channeled through institutions. Those institutions shape the scope of the information that is generated by the population. When federalism is robust, states have sufficient independence to express their diverse perspectives, knowledge, and expertise on policymaking, contributing to the richness of the information space.

We normally think of government as something only the state does, yet many of us are governed far more—and far more obtrusively—by the private government of the workplace. In this provocative and compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson argues that the failure to see this stems from long-standing confusions. These confusions explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, we still talk as if free markets make workers free—and why so many employers advocate less government even while they act as dictators in their businesses.

More than a decade after her death in 2006, there is still no urbanist better known today than Jane Jacobs.  Her forceful, penetrating critique of mid-century urban planning in the United States has had a profound and lasting impact globally.  No surprise then that urbanists around the world in 2011 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, lauded by some as among the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. 

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members. Under what circumstances do private associations provide a stable environment for economic activity?

Dr. Volha Charnysh’s research focuses on historical political economy, legacies of violence, nation- and state-building, and ethnic politics. Her book project examines the long-run effects of forced migration in the aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe, synthesizing several decades of micro-level data collected during a year of fieldwork in Poland. In this talk, she discusses the economic effects of post-war displacement in Poland and Germany.

The Industrial Revolution can be characterised as an acceleration in rates of annual economic growth of income per capita from essentially zero up to the mid 17th century to around 1.8 per cent by the 20th century. It cannot readily be explained if knowledge is treated as a private or as a public good. We have previously shown that science can be considered as a novel good, namely a contribution good, which is a non-depletable good jointly available to those who have contributed to its creation.

Many modern political theorists, from Hobbes to Rawls, fail to grasp the intimate dependence of human freedom on the complex organization and culture of a wide range of social groups. Once we reject individualistic social ontologies along with the modern doctrines of political sovereignty that they support, we are able to make a fresh start and more adequately investigate what sort of institutional and cultural conditions are likely to support what I call the “freedom to flourish.”

What are the political consequences of rapid urbanization across the global south? We argue one consequence has been the rapid formation of political machines, which have been studied in cities ranging from Buenos Aires to Accra to Chicago. Yet we still lack a systematic understanding of how party machines form, and how these formative processes affect how they function. Migrants and Machines seeks to fill this gap.

This ethnographic study of an impoverished African American neighborhood challenges the common misconception of urban ghettos as chaotic places where drug dealing, street crime, and random violence make daily life dangerous for everyone. Waverly Duck is an urban sociologist and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.