Stanford University

Economic Affairs

Economic History Workshop: Time for Growth

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This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid endogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with two sets of instruments: distance from the first adopters and the appearance of repeated solar eclipses. The latter instrument is motivated by the predecessor technologies of mechanical clocks, astronomic instruments that measured the course of heavenly bodies. We find significant growth rates between 1500 and 1700 in the range of 30 percentage points in early adoptor cities and areas.

Lars Boerner is an Assistant Professor of Economic History at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

 

Time for Growth
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351 Landau Economics Building
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-6072

Lars Boerner Assistant Professor Speaker The London School of Economics and Political Science
Workshops

NATO Expansion and the Swap Lines: the Unspoken Geopolitics of the Financial Crisis in Europe, 2007-2013

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2008 witnessed a double shock to the post Cold War order. The North Atlantic financial system suffered a historic crisis, which could be managed only by unprecedented financial intervention by the US state. Weeks before Wall Street imploded, Russia invaded Georgia, a country which earlier in the year had been promised NATO membership. Too little remarked upon at the time, this paper will argue that this conjuncture revealed stark limits to the North Atlantic system of security and financial stability, which since 2013 have come back to haunt us in the on-going Ukrainian crisis. 
 

Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

Note: New Location

CISAC Central Conference Room

Adam Tooze Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History Speaker Columbia University
Seminars

* Cancelled * Seminar with Daniel Stegmueller

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This workshop talk has been cancelled.

 

Daniel Stegmueller is a Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at the Graduate School of Social and Economic Sciences, University of Mannheim. He is  also an associate member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and of CAGE, University of Warwick.

His research lies at the intersection of political economy and political behavior. He studies political preferences and choices in advanced industrialized societies, specifically individuals' preferences for redistribution and redistributive voting. He is interested in how these are shaped by social structure and institutions, but also by basic individual characteristics, such as cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Daniel Stegmueller Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Speaker University of Mannheim
Lectures

Seminar with Monica Martinez-Bravo

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Monica Martinez-Bravo is an associate professor at CEMFI in Madrid, Spain. She received her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2010. Her research interests are in the fields of Political Economy and Economic Development.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)

Monica Martinez-Bravo Associate Professor Speaker CEMFI
Lectures

**Cancelled** Seminar with Torben Iversen

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**This event has been cancelled**

 

Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge UP 1999), and co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale UP, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge UP 2000) and has published more than three dozen articles in leading journals and edited volumes. His work has won numerous American Political Science Association prizes including the Victoria Schuck Award, Best Book on European Politics and Society Award, the Luebbert Best Article Award, and the Gabriel Almond Best Dissertation Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently completing a book-length project with David Soskice on the political representation of economic interests in historical perspective.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Torben Iversen Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy Speaker Harvard University
Lectures

"The Legacy of War on Fiscal Capacity" with Didac Queralt

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States make war, and wars make states. The second clause of Tilly's dictum assumes that the fiscal effort that states exert to wage war persists over time. This paper investigates the effect of war on long-term fiscal capacity as a function of two types of war financing instruments: taxes and loans. Tax-waged wars are argued to exert lasting effects on state capacity, as new taxes require enhancements of the state apparatus as well as complementary fiscal innovations. Loan-waged wars may not contribute to long-term state capacity, as countries might default once the war is over, thus preempting any persistent fiscal effect. Importantly, the way war is waged might be endogenous. To cope with this possibility, I exploit unanticipated crashes in the nineteenth-century international capital markets, which temporarily banned warring states from borrowing regardless of their (un)observed characteristics. The analysis shows that countries that fought wars while the international credit markets were down have today higher fiscal capacity, measured by income tax ratios as well as the size of the tax administration. Altogether, the paper advances the conditions under which wars exert positive and lasting effects on state building.

 

Didac Queralt is a junior professor at the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the NYU Politics Department in September 2012.

His research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and international relations, with a focus on the political economy of fiscal capacity building in Europe (East and West) and the Americas. Using formal methods, he investigates tax compliance in scenarios of low fiscal capacity, as well as the replacement of old forms of taxation (e.g. trade taxes) by modern extractive technologies (e.g. income taxation) that result from deliberate investment in the tax administration. He analyzes the theoretical predictions using contemporary data from developing economies in Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as historical data for European powers in the pre-modern era.

In addition, he investigates the origins of direct taxation in the Western World, both with macro- and micro-data, as well as the electoral politics underlying the expansion of the fiscal state. Currently, he is involved in a quasi-experimental test of the legacy of pre-modern wars on state capacity, and an field experiment on tax progressivity in Colombia,

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)

Didac Queralt Junior Professor Speaker Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG), Barcelona
Seminars

Those Who Know Most: Insider Trading in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam

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This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the eighteenth century that is closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at English securities traded in both London and Amsterdam. Private information reached Amsterdam through sailing boats that sailed only twice a week and in adverse weather could not sail at all. Results are consistent with a Kyle model in which informed agents trade strategically. Most importantly, the speed of information revelation in Amsterdam depended on the expected time until the private signal would become public.

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Publication Type
Journal Articles
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Journal of Political Economy
Authors
Peter Koudijs

Massimo Mannino

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305-6165

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Visiting Student Researcher at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
massimo_mannino.jpg

Massimo Mannino is a Visiting Student Researcher from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, under the supervision of Michael Bechtel (University of St.Gallen) and Jens Hainmueller (Stanford University). His dissertation explores the political economy of natural disasters and is part of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The Global Impact of Russia's Political and Economic Situation

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This event is now full, and we are unable to accept any further RSVPs.  Please email khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to a wait list.

 

Russia's aggressive foreign policy is backed by Putin's domestic popularity ratings and his strong grip on Russia's political system. But in reality, how firmly does Putin control Russian politics? Can the ongoing economic crisis in Russia pose challenges to his system and the upcoming federal elections of 2016-2018? What impact will Russian domestic politics play in Russia's international behavior?

 

Vladimir Milov is a Russian opposition politician, publicist, economist & energy expert. He was the Deputy Minister of Energy of Russia (2002), adviser to the Minister of Energy (2001-2002), and head of strategy department at the Federal Energy Commission, the natural monopoly regulator (1999-2001). Milov is the author of major energy reform concepts, including the concept of market restructuring and unbundling of Gazprom, which was banned from implementation by President Vladimir Putin. He is the founder and president of the Institute of Energy Policy, a leading independent Russian energy policy think tank (since 2003). Milov is a columnist of major Russian political and business publications, including Forbes Russia, and a frequent commentator on Russian political and economic affairs in major Western media outlets (The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, etc.). Since leaving the Russian Government in 2002, Milov has became a vocal public critic of Vladimir Putin’s dirigiste and authoritarian course. Milov is also active in the Russian opposition politics, serving as Chairman of the “Democratic Choice” opposition party (www.en.demvybor.ru), and is also known as co-author of the critical public report on Vladimir Putin’s Presidential legacy called “Putin. The Results”, written together with Boris Nemtsov (several editions published since 2008).

Vladimir Milov former Russian Deputy Minister of Energy Speaker
Lectures
European Security Initiative
European Security Initiative Lecture Series

Many Greeks Still Want a Deal

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As the Greek national referendum on the proposed austerity package draws near, Stanford political scientist Jens Hainmueller and co-author Yotam Margalit (Tel Aviv and Columbia Universities) share the surprising results of a survey conducted on a national sample of 2,000 Greek voters in the June 30, 2015 edition of The New York Times.  

 

 

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Commentary
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
The New York Times
Authors
Jens Hainmueller
Yotam Margalit
External URL
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