Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP)
At the Elliott School of International Affairs
Monday April 1, 2024
Hall of Government, 321
2115 G Street NW, Washington DC 20052
Please join the GW Department of Economics for a trade and development seminar with Cory Smith, assistant professor at the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.
March 25, 2024
Hall of Government, 321,
2115 G Street NW, Washington DC 20052
Join the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Economics for a trade and development seminar with economist Roman David Zarate. He will present on his paper “The Gains from Foreign Investment in an Economy with Distortions,” which is a joint work with Isabela Manelici and Jose P. Vasquez from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Roman is an economist at the Trade and Integration unit of the World Bank’s Development Research Group (DEC-RG).
Feburary 28, 2024
1957 E Street NW, Lindner Family Commons: Room 602
Jose W. Fernandez was confirmed by the Senate as Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment on August 6, 2021. He leads the State Department’s bureaus and offices that stand at the center of the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts on climate change, clean energy, health, supply chain security, and other economic priorities. Under Secretary Fernandez is also the United States Alternate Governor to the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Inter-American Development Bank. From 2009 to 2013, he served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs, one of the bureaus he now oversees. Prior to his most recent appointment at the Department of State, Under Secretary Fernandez was a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York. His practice focused on mergers, acquisitions, and finance in Europe and emerging markets, advising U.S. and foreign clients in the telecommunications, energy, water, banking, and consumer industries.
He was named one of the “World’s Leading Lawyers” by Chambers Global for his M&A and corporate work, a “Highly Regarded” practitioner by the International Financial Law Review, and one of the “World’s Leading Privatization Lawyers” by Euromoney Publications. He has been chair of the Inter-American law committees of both the American Bar Association and The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, as well as of the Cross-Border M&A and Joint Venture Committee of the New York State Bar Association. Most recently, Fernandez was an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School, where he taught the course on international business transactions. A life-long supporter of the arts and education, Under Secretary Fernandez has served as a trustee of Dartmouth College and NPR-station WBGO-FM, and on the Board of Directors of Acción International, the Council of the Americas, Ballet Hispanico of New York, the Middle East Institute, and the Partnership for Inner City Education. He was the Transition Policy Director for then-Governor-Elect Phil Murphy of New Jersey in 2017, and a director of Iberdrola S.A. until assuming his current position. The Under Secretary graduated from Dartmouth College and received an honorary degree from the College. He earned a Juris Doctor from Columbia University School of Law, where he was awarded the Charles Evans Hughes Prize and a Parker School Certificate of International Law with honors.
Wednesday, November 16, 2022
12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Hall of Government, Room: 321
Friday, September 30th, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM (US/Eastern)
Friday, September 30th, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (US/Eastern)
Monday, October 3rd, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM (US/Eastern)
Tuesday, October 4th, 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM (US/Eastern)
via Zoom
Washington International Trade Association in partnership with the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University and the World Trade Center DC proudly presented the four-part Virtual Intensive Trade Seminar.
The 2022 Intensive Trade Seminar was held virtually on Zoom over three days, September 30, October 3, and October 4.
Speakers help attendees increase their professional knowledge by learning the nuts and bolts of trade policy directly from career trade policy professionals from across government, industry, and law.
2022 Speakers Include:
Tuesday, November 9th, 2021
12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. EST
via Zoom
How do targeted firms respond to international trade sanctions? While the macroeconomic effect of trade sanctions has been extensively studied, little is known about how trade sanctions shape firm dynamics and their heterogeneous effects in a targeted country. Exploring detailed Iranian manufacturing firm surveys, I examine firm-level asymmetric effects of the 2012-2013 U.S. and EU trade sanctions against Iran due to Iran’s nuclear program. Empirical analysis shows that the sanctions cut Iranian firms’ exports in half and imports by over 30 percent and, on average, reduced firm-level productivity, profit, revenue, and employment. However, intriguingly, exporting firms were found to mitigate negative effects of sanctions through increased presence in the domestic market, transferring sanction shocks to non-exporting firms. At the same time, importing firms responded to sanctions by sourcing more domestic inputs at the expense of non-importing firms. Based on a stylized model featuring heterogeneous firms with capacity constraints, I show that the export sanctions increased consumer welfare by 4.35 percent with decreasing domestic prices for a given income level. In contrast, import sanctions led to a 7.5 percent consumer welfare loss by increasing prices. The stylized model implies alleviating exporting firm capacity constraints during adverse trade shocks increases positive impacts through export channels.
About the Speaker:
Ebad Ebadi is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at George Washington University, where he researches the impacts of economic sanctions on firms and individuals and gender inequality in the Iranian labor market. He has written for numerous publications, including the Atlantic Council. He holds M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Tehran.
Thursday, November 4th, 2021
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. ET
Lindner Family Commons, Suite 602, and Online via Zoom
From the Elliott School to Global Finance Leader: A Discussion with James Quigley, ESIA BA ’82
Inaugural Wenger Family Lecture
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a global banker who rose to the top of one of the largest financial firms in the nation? In the Inaugural Wenger Family Lecture on International Business and Finance, James Quigley, BA ’82, a forty-year Wall Street veteran who joined Merrill Lynch not long after graduation day, discussed his career lessons and successes in conversation with Elliott School Dean Alyssa Ayres. Mr. Quigley’s work has taken him around the world – and his success stems in large part from his ability to understand cultural nuances in dozens of nations. This event was presented by the Elliott School Office of Development and Alumni Relations and cosponsored by the Henry E. & Consuelo S. Wenger Foundation and the Institute for International Economic Policy.
About the Speaker:
James Quigley is a Managing Director and was named Executive Vice Chairman of International Corporate and Investment Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2010. He is responsible for enhancing the firm’s relationships with key private and public sector issuer clients and institutional investors globally to ensure delivery of the bank’s full capabilities across asset classes and product sets. Previously, he was president of Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Latin America Group and managed all activities of the broader institution within the region.
Prior to Bank of America and Merrill Lynch’s merger, Quigley was Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., Executive Chairman of Merrill Lynch International and Head of Latin America Global Markets & Investment Banking. As Executive Chairman of Merrill Lynch International, he served as partner and advisor to the global business heads and BlackRock, Inc. to maximize revenue and strategic growth opportunities across key markets in origination, trading, private client and principal investing businesses. As Head of Latin America Global, he defined business strategy in the region, integrating country, industry and product capabilities. He was also responsible for integrating businesses in Canada and for client coverage in the CEEMEA Region. As Vice Chairman, Quigley worked with the leaders of Global Markets & Investment Banking’s core businesses and regional executive management to prioritize and implement client coverage and origination strategies to maximize revenue opportunities, including aligning the global client origination efforts with those of the Merrill Lynch Bank Group.
Quigley, who joined Merrill Lynch in January 1983 in the New York Debt Syndicate Group, has held a variety of senior positions including Senior Vice President and Head of Client Strategies for Global Debt Markets, Head of GDM’s Global Issuer Client Group, Executive Director of the Global Syndicate Group, Head of the U.S. High Grade Syndicate Group and Head of the Debt Transactions Group.
At the Elliott School, Quigley served on the Board of Advisors for 12 years, from 2000-2008 and 2014-2018. He currently serves on the Executive Circle for the Institute for International Economic Policy.
About the Moderator:
Alyssa Ayres is Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Dean Ayres is a foreign policy practitioner and award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. She was Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she remains an adjunct senior fellow. From 2010 to 2013 Ayres served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia in the Barack Obama administration, where she covered all issues across a dynamic region of 1.3 billion people at the time (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and provided policy direction for four U.S. embassies and four consulates. Her work focuses primarily on India’s role in the world and on U.S. relations with South Asia in the larger Indo-Pacific. Her most recent book is, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World (OUP, 2018). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
This event is presented by the Elliott School Office of Development and Alumni Relations and cosponsored by the Henry E. & Consuelo S. Wenger Foundation and the Institute for International Economic Policy.
GW Students, Faculty, and Staff are welcome to attend this event in person at the address below or via Zoom:
Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Family Commons, Suite 602
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052
Alumni, Guests, and General Public: Online via Zoom. Details for joining the event by computer or phone will be sent the day before the event. Please be mindful of the time zone of the presentation (ET).
A reception follows the discussion for the in-person audience.
A note about COVID-19: The health and well-being of GW students, alumni, friends, faculty, and staff remains a top priority for GW and all alumni events will proceed in compliance with all state, local, and public health guidelines.
Please complete the above form (“Register Here”) to officially register. Please register yourself individually for possible contact tracing and to ensure receipt of Zoom information. For questions, please contact Elaine Garbe in Elliott School Alumni Programs at egarbe@gwu.edu.
Monday, June 21, 2021
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EDT
via Zoom
We were pleased to invite you to a new webinar series, “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series brings attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics. The inaugural event in the series featured Branko Milanovic.
The goal of the series is to bring together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, both within the academy and without, to present their work and to discuss both their ideas and methods, with the intention of working towards new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate, and will help cultivate a community of current and future researchers and practitioners. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
In many countries, the political elites appear to be dominated by wealthy individuals. One commonly cited reason is the nature of the campaign finance system. Weak limits on campaign spending and rules protecting the role of outside funding may be especially advantageous for well-off candidates, given their greater ability to self-finance and stronger connections to deep-pocketed donors. While intuitive, this conjecture has scarcely been studied systematically across countries due to the lack of comprehensive data on politicians’ wealth. At the same time, insights on the topic from the U.S. are difficult to generalize from its highly idiosyncratic campaign finance regime. Drawing on newly-collected data from asset disclosures in a number of countries around the world, the paper examines cross-nationally the extent to which the variation in elected officials’ wealth is correlated with differences in limits on campaign spending. The paper further explores potential mechanisms by which campaign spending caps affect the composition of political elites by exploiting the recent campaign finance reforms enacted in Brazil and Chile.
Meet the Speakers:
Marko Klašnja is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Government Department. He holds a PhD in political science (NYU, 2015). In 2014-2015, Marko was a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, Princeton. His research focuses on democratic accountability and the inequalities in political representation, with a special focus on the electoral fortunes of corrupt politicians, the role of parties in democratic accountability, the causes and consequences of politicians’ wealth, and the political attitudes and preferences of wealthy individuals. At Georgetown, Marko teaches courses on comparative political economy and quantitative research methods.
Nina Eichacker is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rhode Island. She earned her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work synthesizes Post Keynesian economic theory with International Political Economy to better understand the effects of globalization, financial liberalization, and public intervention in neoliberalism and beyond. Her teaching interests lie in critical macrofinance, money and banking, and the economics of globalization.
Tim Shenk is an assistant professor in the department of history at GW and co-editor of Dissent. He is currently working on two books. The first, based on his dissertation and under contract with Princeton University Press, examines the emergence of the idea of “the economy” in the United States during the twentieth century. The second explores the intellectual history of the American political elite from the writing of the Constitution down to the present. Tentatively titled The Golden Line: The People, The Powerful, and the American Political Tradition, it is under contract with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
9 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EDT
via Webex
This workshop showcased the most recent advances in the field of economics on conflict with a particular focus on the local and spillover effects of conflict, conflict and spatial poverty traps, and policies to mitigate potential negative effects of conflict such as infrastructure investment. While the policy focus of this workshop was on Africa, the presentations included a larger geographical coverage. The workshop was divided into two sessions. First there was a round table discussion with two presentations by the main keynote speakers, followed by a Q&A session. Second, authors presented their research papers, followed by feedback by a discussant and a Q&A session.
This event was jointly organized by the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice, the Office of the Director for Regional Integration for Africa of the World Bank, and the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University.
Deborah Wetzel, a U.S. national with more than 25 years of experience in development work around the world, is the World Bank Director for Regional Integration for Africa, the Middle East and Northern Africa. Prior to her current appointment, Wetzel was the Senior Director for Governance from April 2016 to April 2019. She also served as the Director of Strategy and Operations for the Middle East and North Africa Region, as well as Country Director for Brazil, from March 2012 until July 2015. Previous roles include World Bank Group’s Chief of Staff to the World Bank President from 2010 to 2012, and Director for Governance and Public Sector, where she directed the Bank’s work on taxation, public expenditures, decentralization, public sector reform and strengthening, governance and anti-corruption. From 2006 to 2009, she led the World Bank’s Economic and Public Sector Programs in Brazil, based in Brasilia. During that period, she developed numerous programs with state and federal governments to help improve the effectiveness of public expenditures and achieve better results. Wetzel has a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Oxford and a Masters in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. Her BA is from Smith College. She is the author of publications on fiscal decentralization, public finance, governance, and sub-national affairs.
Moderator:
Carolina Sánchez-Páramo, a Spanish national, is currently the Global Director of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice (GP) at the World Bank. Prior to this assignment, she was the Poverty and Equity GP Practice Manager in the Europe and Central Asia region. Carolina has worked on operations, policy advice and analytical activities in Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Asia, and was part of the core team working on the WDR2012, “Gender Equality and Development”. Her main areas of interest and expertise include labor economics, poverty and distributional analysis, gender equality and welfare impacts of public policy. She has led reports on poverty and equity, labor markets and economic growth in several countries, as well as social sector operations. She has published articles in refereed journals and edited books on the topics described above. Carolina has a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.
Keynote Speakers:
Chris Blattman is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The University of Chicago’s Pearson Institute and Harris Public Policy. He is an economist and political scientist who studies poverty, violence and crime in developing countries. He has designed and evaluated strategies for tackling poverty, including cash transfers to the poorest. Much of his work is with the victims and perpetrators of crime and violence, testing the link between poverty and violence. His recent work looks at other sources of and solutions to violence. These solutions range from behavioral therapy to social norm change and local-level state building. He has worked mainly in Colombia, Liberia, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Chicago’s South Side. Dr. Blattman was previously faculty at Columbia and Yale Universities, and holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School. He chairs the Peace & Recovery sector at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Crime, Violence and Conflict initiative at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (JPAL).
Dominic Rohner (PhD, University of Cambridge) is a Professor and co-director of the economics department at HEC Lausanne, the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne. He is also Associate Editor at the Economic Journal, the PI of a European Research Council grant, the leader of the CEPR Research and Policy Network on “Policies for Peace”, a member of the Swiss National Research Council, and co-leader of the E4S group on “Evidence-based environmental policies”. Prior to joining UNIL, he held positions at the universities of York and Zurich. His research focuses on political and development economics, has won several prizes and has been widely published in journals such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and PNAS.
Speakers:
Nathan Nunn is Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in political economy, economic history, economic development, cultural economics, and international trade. He is an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, a Research Fellow at BREAD, a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA), and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Boundaries, Membership & Belonging program. One stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the historical and dynamic process of economic development. In particular, he has studied the factors that shape differences in the evolution of institutions and cultures across societies. He has published research that studies the historical process of a wide range of factors that are crucial for economic development, including distrust, gender norms, religiosity, norms of rule-following, conflict, immigration, state formation, and support for democracy. His current research interests lie in better understanding the importance of local culture and context for economic policies, particularly in developing countries.
Rémi Jedwab is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab’s main fields of research are development and growth, urban economics, labor economics and political economy. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, the relationship between population growth and economic growth, the economic effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Urban Economics. Finally, he is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and Regional Science and Urban Economics.
Maria Micaela Sviatschi is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She is also an affiliate at the CESifo Research Network, NBER development and political economy group, the African School of Economics and the International Crisis Group. Her research interests are labor and development economics, with a focus on human capital, gender-violence and crime. One strand of her research explores how children start a criminal career in drug trafficking and gangs as well as the consequences of organized crime on economic development and state capacity. In particular, she has worked on the development of criminal skills in drug trafficking organizations in Peru and gangs in El Salvador. In addition, she studies how criminal organizations such as gangs and drug trafficking groups affect household’s behavior and state presence in the areas they control. Another strand of her research studies the role of state capacity to deter and improve service-delivery to reduce gender-based violence. In particular, studying the effects of women police officers in Peru and police street patrolling in India. In addition to this research, she has ongoing collaborative research projects in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Colombia, Mozambique, Jordan, Bangladesh and the US.
Mathias Thoenig is a Professor of Economics at the School of Business and Economics (HEC) at the University of Lausanne, a CEPR Research Fellow in the international trade and macro programs and an elected Council Member of the European Economic Association. He is a Distinguished Scholar at IMD Business School and a Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Mathias Thoenig received his Ph.D. from University Paris-1 Sorbonne and his B.A. in engineering from Ecole Polytechnique. He has held visiting appointments at International Monetary Fund, MIT, SciencesPo Paris, University of British Columbia and University Pompeu Fabra. He also served on the editorial boards of Journal of European Economic Association and International Economics. His research interests include development, international trade and political economy of conflicts and migration. He has published and forthcoming papers in several international journals, including, among others: American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Harvard Business Review, Journal of European Economic Association. He has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2013 for his work on the role of distrust and grievances in ethnic conflicts.
Discussants:
Roland Hodler is Professor of Economics at the University of St.Gallen and Research Fellow at CEPR, CESifo and OxCarre. His research covers topics in development and political economics. His interests include how ethnic diversity, natural resources and foreign aid influence economic and human development as well as conflict, corruption and favoritism. His research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and covered by the BBC, the Economist, the Guardian, Le Monde, NZZ, and the Washington Post. He is also a member of the Bayelsa State Oil & Environmental Commission.
Mathieu Couttenier has obtained his PhD in Economics in 2011 at the University Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics. Before to join the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon as Professor, he was post-doc at the University of Lausanne and assistant professor at the University of Geneva. He was also visiting researcher at the department of political sciences at Stanford and at the economic department at Sciences Po Paris. His research is filled with interactions between economics and political sciences but also cultural, institutional and geographical issues. He focuses on microeconomic questions, in particular in the fields of applied political economy and economic development. His main research interests are in the understanding of violence and civil wars. He has published many academic papers on the role played by income shocks, natural resources or climate on the diffusion of conflicts over space and time. Some of his present research agenda also studies the role of natural resources in the local economic development. He has published in many leading peer-refereed journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Comparative Economics.
Elena Esposito is Assistant Professor at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. She is an applied economist with research interests in the fields of development economics, economic growth, political economy, and economic history. Elena Esposito earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bologna in 2014 and she joined the department of Economics at the European University Institute (Italy) as “Max Weber Fellow”. She spent research periods at the departments of economics at universities in the USA. She also worked as an economic researcher and consultant for several international organizations, participating to projects with UNICEF, the European Commission and the World Bank, among others.
Eoin McGuirk is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Neubauer Faculty Fellow at Tufts University. His research interests are in development and political economics, with a particular focus on the causes and consequences of political violence and social divisions. In his research, he has examined how variation in world food prices can affect the type and location of conflict events in Africa, and how politicians are more likely to perpetuate conflict when they are sheltered from its costs. Most of his research employs natural experiments in order to identify causal relationships. He has Ph.D. in Economics from Trinity College, University of Dublin, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Thursday, May 13, 2021 – Friday, May 14, 2021
The Washington Area Development Economics Symposium (WADES) is an annual research conference which highlights academic work from researchers at leading economics institutions in development economics in the Washington DC area. Researchers from George Washington University, University of Maryland, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Virginia, the World Bank, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), American University, George Mason University, and the Center for Global Development are all participants in the symposium. The 2021 virtual-WADES will be hosted by the Georgetown University Initiative for Innovation, Development, and Evaluation.
Agenda
Thursday, May 13, 2:00 pm – 6:00 pm
2:00 – 2:30: Faculty Presentation:
Remi Jedwab (GWU): “Estimating the Spillover Effects of Foreign Conflict: Evidence from Boko Haram”
2:45 – 3:30: Student Presentation:
Deniz Sanin (Georgetown): “Do Domestic Violence Laws Protect Women from Domestic Violence? Evidence from Rwanda”
Discussant: Kenneth Leonard (Maryland)
3:45 – 4:15: Washington Area Research Showcase: Poster Session
4:30 – 5:15: Student Presentation:
Tomohiro Hara (Maryland): “Radio and racism during Apartheid”
Discussant: Alessandra Fenizia (GWU)
5:30 – 6:00: Faculty Presentation:
Shan Aman-Rana (UVA): “Gender, information exchange and choice over co-workers: experimental evidence” (with Clement Minaudier, Brais Alvarez Pereira, and Shamyla Chaudry)
Friday, May 14, 2:00 pm – 5:30 pm
2:00 – 2:30: Faculty Presentation:
M. R. Sharan (Maryland): “Something to Complain About: How Minority Representatives Overcome Ethnic Differences”
2:45 – 3:30: Student Presentation:
Luan Santos (UVA): “Deadly Politics: Political Connections, Intergovernmental Transfers, and Mortality”
Discussant: Jishnu Das (Georgetown)
3:30 – 4:00: Coffee Break
4:00 – 4:45: Student Presentation:
Federico Haslop (GWU): “Climate Change, Rural Livelihoods and Urbanization: Evidence from the Permanent Shrinking of Lake Chad”
Discussant: Gaurav Chiplunkar (UVA)
5:00 – 5:30: Faculty Presentation:
Catherine Michaud Leclerc (Georgetown): “Private School Entry, Sorting, and Performance of Public Schools: Evidence from Pakistan”
Thursday, April 29, 2021 – Friday, April 30, 2021
8:45 a.m. – 01:00 p.m. EDT
via Zoom
Friday, February 19, 2021
8:45am – 3:45pm
Zoom
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
11 am EDT
WebEx
We are pleased to invite you to a conversation with Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh who created a model for combating poverty through microlending. He is also the founder of the Yunus Centre, a think tank for issues related to social business. He is the author of three books, including Banker to the Poor. The event will be moderated by Dr. James Foster, Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy and Oliver T. Carr Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at the George Washington University. This event is jointly sponsored by IIEP, the Elliott School of International Affairs, the LEAP Initiative, and the George Washington University.
About the Speaker:
Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus is the father of both social business and microcredit, the founder of Grameen Bank, and of more than 50 other companies in Bangladesh. For his constant innovation and enterprise, Fortune magazine named Professor Yunus in March 2012 as “one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. In 2006, Professor Yunus and Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to “create economic and social development from below.”
Dr. Yunus is the recipient of 61 honorary degrees from universities across 24 countries. He has received 136 awards from 33 countries including state honours from 10 countries. He is one of only seven individuals to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, the United State Presidential Medal of Freedom and the United States Congressional Gold Medal. He has appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Newsweek and Forbes magazine. In 2016 GWU awarded him the President’s Medal in recognition of his service.
About the Moderator:
James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in Mexico. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu.
Professor Foster’s work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank.
About the Speakers:
Albert Muchanga joined the African Union Commission as Commissioner for Trade and Industry in March 2017. In this position, he has spearheaded the AU’s efforts in driving the negotiations, conclusion and ratification of the AfCFTA agreement, which entered into force in May 2019. Ambassador Muchanga has extensive experience in the promotion of inter-governmental relations, engagement with the private sector and civil society as well as promotion of regional integration and cooperation as levers of sustainable development. He previously worked in the Zambian Civil Service and served as Zambia’s Ambassador to Brazil and Ethiopia, and Deputy Executive Secretary of the Southern African Development Community.
Florizelle (Florie) Liser is the third President and CEO of CCA. Ms. Liser brings expertise and an extensive network on trade and Africa to her new role, along with a strong track record of working with the private sector to translate policy into action. She is the first woman to lead the Council since its founding in 1993.
Ms. Liser joined CCA from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), where she was the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa since 2003. At USTR, she led trade and investment policy towards 49 sub-Saharan African nations and oversaw implementation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Previously, Ms. Liser served as Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Industry, Market Access, and Telecommunications from 2000-2003. She also served as Senior Trade Policy Advisor in the Office of International Transportation and Trade at the Department of Transportation from 1987-2000; worked as a Director in USTR’s Office of GATT Affairs, and served as an Associate Fellow at the Overseas Development Council (ODC) from 1975-1980.
Currently, she is a member of the Advisory Council for the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), Advisory Committee and Sub-Saharan Africa Advisory Committee for the Export-Import Bank (EXIM), and a Board member with the Women in International Trade (WITT). Ms. Liser holds a M.A. in International Economics from Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a B.A. in International Relations and Political Science from Dickinson College.
Tony Carroll is vice president of Manchester Trade, a Washington trade, development and business consulting firm. He is also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has 35 years of business and development experience in Africa dating from his Peace Corps service in Botswana (1976-78). He specializes in investments that involve transferring new technologies and methodologies to Africa. He served as assistant general counsel to the Peace Corps, member of the advisory boards of EXIM Bank, OPIC and USTR and was a congressional nominee to the Board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation. He currently serves as a director to the Acorus Fund in Hong Kong. He has degrees in economics and law from the University of Denver and an MAPA from the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Jennifer G. Cooke is director of the Institute for African Studies at The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. The Institute serves as central for research, scholarly discussion, and debate on issues relevant to Africa. She is a professor of practice in international affairs, teaching courses on U.S. Policy Toward Africa and Transnational Security Threats in Africa.
Cooke joined George Washington University in August 2018, after 18 years as director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she led research and analysis on political, economic, and security dynamics in Africa. While at CSIS, Cooke directed projects on a wide range of African issues, including on violent extremist organizations in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, China’s growing role in Africa, democracy and elections in Nigeria, religion and state authority in Africa, “stress-testing” state stability in Africa, Africa’s changing energy landscape, and more. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on U.S.-Africa policy and has provided briefing, commentary, and testimony to the media, US Congress, AFRICOM leadership and the U.S. military.
She has traveled widely in Africa and has been an election observer in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, and Nigeria. As a teenager, she lived in Cote d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic. She holds an M.A. in African studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in government, magna cum laude, from Harvard University.
Cosponsored by:
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT
WebEx
This was the first webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The first talk in the Envisioning India Series was “Fiscal Dominance: A Theory of Everything in India” and featured Viral V. Acharya of NYU-Stern.
He discussed the following: Financial stability is perhaps the most important prerequisite for stable growth. It is surprisingly also the most compromised one. Encouraging cheap credit and rapid balance-sheet growth in the financial sector is a temptation that many governments find hard to resist to register well on the short-run growth scorecard. Post 1991 reforms, India undertook an upward and onward march in economic progress for close to two decades. Since then, lack of financial stability has emerged as its Achilles’ heel. The reasons for this are many but a first and foremost contributor has been the increasing dominance of banking and financial sector regulation by the unyielding deficit situation of the consolidated government balance-sheet. Reining in this fiscal dominance requires not just a strengthening of the institutional framework of financial sector regulation but also the right balance between the role played by the government, the central bank, the markets, and the private sector in the economy.
About the Speaker:
Viral V. Acharya is the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business (NYU-Stern) and an Academic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Philadelphia. Viral was a Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) during 23rd January 2017 to 23rd July 2019 in charge of Monetary Policy, Financial Markets, Financial Stability, and Research. His speeches while at the RBI will release in the end of July 2020 in the form of a book titled “Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India” (SAGE Publications India), with a new introductory chapter “Fiscal Dominance: A Theory of Everything in India”. Viral completed Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 1995 and Ph.D. in Finance from NYU-Stern in 2001. Prior to joining Stern, he was at London Business School (2001-2008), the Academic Director of the Coller Institute of Private Equity at LBS (2007-09) and a Senior Houblon-Normal Research Fellow at the Bank of England (Summer 2008). Viral’s primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk of the financial sector, its regulation and its genesis in government-induced distortions, an inquiry that cuts across several other strands of research – credit risk and liquidity risk, their interactions and agency-theoretic foundations, as well as their general equilibrium consequences. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Financial Analysts Journal. He is currently associate editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies (RCFS, 2011-) and Review of Finance (2006-), and was an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation (2009-12) and associate editor of the Journal of Finance (2011-14).
Discussants:
Liaquat Ahamed is the author of the critically acclaimed best-seller, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about central bankers during the Great Depression of 1929-1932. The book won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2010 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the 2009 Financial Times-Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award. Ahamed was a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently a director of the Putnam Funds. He is on the board of trustees of the Journal of Philosophy, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and a former trustee of the Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge.
Rakesh Mohan is one of India’s senior-most economic policymakers and an expert on central banking, monetary policy, infrastructure and urban affairs. Most recently he was executive director at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and chairman, National Transport Development Policy Committee, Government of India, in the rank of a Minister of State. He is also a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India. As deputy governor he was in charge of monetary policy, financial markets, economic research and statistics. In addition to serving in various posts for the Indian government, including representing India in a variety of international forums such as Basel and G20, Mohan has worked for the World Bank and headed prestigious research institutes. He is also Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute and Distinguished Fellow of Brookings India. Mohan has written extensively on urban economics, urban development, Indian economic policy reforms, monetary policy and central banking.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT
WebEx
This event is co-sponsored by the Elliott School, the Leadership, Ethics, and Practice (LEAP) Initiative, the GW Economics Department‘s Microeconomics Workshop, and the GW Philosophy Department.
The challenge of distributing moral responsibility when a group behaves badly occurs in many walks of life, from war and politics to corporate behavior. This has been discussed at length in economics, philosophy and law. This lecture will draw on moral philosophy and game theory to shed light on this topic, and demonstrate how we often make mistakes when attributing responsibility for collective behavior to individuals. The lecture will present real-life contexts where this problem arises and develop some new games which help us deal with the challenge. It will also present some open-ended questions for further research.
Event Schedule:
Welcome Remarks by IIEP Director James Foster and LEAP Director Christopher Kojm
Address by Prof. Kaushik Basu
Discussant Remarks by James Foster
Q&A moderated by James Foster
About the Speaker:
Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. He is currently the President of the International Economic Association and a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. He recently served as Chief Economist at the World Bank and before that was Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. During his four years at the Bank he co-taught a popular course in the Elliott School with James Foster, entitled Introduction to Game Theory and Strategic Thinking, which every week brought 150 GW students and many visitors from the Bank and other neighboring institutions to the Harry Harding Auditorium of the Elliott School. One class per term was held in Preston Auditorium of the World Bank. As one student commented “Being taught by Prof. Basu was definitely an only at GW moment!” He has now returned to Cornell but fondly remembers his time in DC – especially his weekly chats with GW students and his daily strolls across the GW campus from home to work in the Bank, and back again.
Professor Basu has research interests that span across development economics, welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, and law. As a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, he founded the Centre for Development Economics in 1992 and served as its first Executive Director. Kaushik Basu holds a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and M.Sc. and PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, and several honorary degrees, including doctorates from IIT Bombay, Fordham University New York, Bath University, England, and the University of Florence. His recent books are “An Economist in the Real World” and “The Republic of Beliefs.”
In this presentation, Professor Basu will be recounting his latest research which shows how simple insights from game theory can shed light on problems in moral philosophy. After the presentation, Professor Foster will provide a short commentary and then will moderate an extended session for Q&A from the audience.
Tuesday, August 4, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx
We were pleased to invite you to the webinar series “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series brings attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.
The seventh event, “Are Informal Workers Benefiting from Globalization? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in India” featured Dr. Nita Rudra of Georgetown University. The discussion focused on the following: Are citizens in the developing world convinced about the benefits of globalization? By leveraging their comparative advantage in low labor costs, economists predict once-poor citizens will be better off with open markets. Yet, surprisingly little rigorous research exists on if and how workers in developing countries actually experience the benefits of increasing trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in an era of rapidly expanding global supply chains. To answer this question, we focused on the largest cluster of low-wage laborers in developing countries, informal workers, and their experience with FDI. Using observational and experimental methods, we find that both formal and informal workers in India strongly approve of foreign investment. However, the latter are deeply skeptical that the benefits of FDI will ever trickle down to themselves or their future generations. India’s much smaller population of formal workers, by contrast, are confident that they have privileged access to coveted jobs in foreign firms – regardless of skill level- and social mobility prospects will improve. These findings provide new insights on (macro and micro-level) drivers of growing global inequalities, and call for caution amongst scholars, policymakers, the international business community, and all those who anticipate that globalization is lifting all boats.
About the Moderator:
James Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).
About the Speaker:
Nita Rudra is a Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her research interests include: the distributional impacts of trade and financial liberalization as they are mediated by politics and institutions; the influence of international organizations on policies in developing economies; the politics of trade agreements involving developing economies, and the causes and effects of democracy in globalizing developing nations. Her most critical works appear in the British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization and International Studies Quarterly . Her most recent book with Cambridge University Press is entitled: Democracies in Peril: Taxation and Redistribution in Globalizing Economies. Her current projects analyze how and why widespread poverty persists in rapidly globalizing economies, the politics supporting/resisting changes to the informal sector, the anti-globalization backlash, and the politics of trade and trade agreements.
About the Discussants:
Maggie Chen is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has served as Director of GW’s Institute for International Economic Policy and worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank and a consultant for the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Professor Chen’s research areas include multinational firms, international trade, and regional trade agreements. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. She is a co-editor of Economic Inquiry and an associate editor of Economic Modeling.
Deepa Ollapally is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, India-China relations, and Asian regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Sigur Center. She also directs the Rising Powers Initiative, a major research program that tracks and analyzes foreign policy debates in aspiring powers of Asia and Eurasia. Dr. Ollapally is currently working on a funded book, Big Power Competition for Influence in the Indian Ocean Region, which assesses the shifting patterns of geopolitical influence by major powers in the region since 2005 and the drivers of these changes. She is the author of five books including Worldviews of Aspiring Powers (Oxford, 2012) and The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge, 2008). Her most recent books are two edited volumes, Energy Security in Asia and Eurasia (Routledge, 2017), and Nuclear Debates in Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Dr. Ollapally has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, MacArthur Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asia Foundation for projects related to India and Asia. Previously, she was Associate Professor at Swarthmore College and has been a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London and at Columbia University. Dr. Ollapally also held senior positions in the policy world including the US Institute of Peace, Washington DC and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. She is a frequent commentator in the media, including appearances on CNN, BBC, CBS, Diane Rehm Show and Reuters TV. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Thursday July 16, 2020
11:00AM – 12:00PM EDT
via Zoom.us
The US and the UK have a long history of collaborating to create innovative trade agreements. Continuing discussions on innovations in digital trade and data governance, this webinar addresses how the two nations may negotiate the digital trade chapter of the proposed US/UK trade agreement. The UK’s approach may build on its draft negotiating language for its free trade agreement with the EU, while the US plans to include “state of the art” rules, including a ban on mandates to disclose source code and algorithms and “rules limiting platform liability for third-party content.” The event was held on Thursday, July 16. Our speakers included:
– Sabina Ciofu, Head of EU and Trade Policy, techUK
– Sam duPont, Deputy Director, Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, German Marshall Fund (former Director, Digital Trade, Office of the US Trade Representative)
This event is co-sponsored by Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub; UK Trade Policy Observatory; Internet Society: Greater Washington DC Chapter; George Washington Center for International Business Education and Research (GW-CIBER); Centre for International Governance Innovation; World Wide Web Foundation; and Institute for International Science and Technology Policy.
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx
We are pleased to invite you to a new webinar series, “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series will focus on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series will bring attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.
The fifth event, “How Should We Measure Multidimensional Inequality? A Philosopher’s Approach (with COVID applications)” will feature Dr. Kristi Olson of Bowdoin College. The discussion will focus on the following: When we measure multidimensional inequality, we must decide how much weight to give each dimension. The simple approach—giving each dimension equal weight—is almost certainly wrong, but what are the alternatives? This paper critiques some of the familiar approaches: subjective utility and the envy test. It then introduces a new approach. We take as the equal baseline those bundles that could be cooperatively distributed if everyone were free to choose from among all bundles. Using these bundles as the baseline, we can measure the extent of deviation from equality. The approach can be used to evaluate inequalities in, for example, the distribution of COVID risk and income.
About the Speakers:
Kristi A. Olson is an assistant professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College where she works on issues of distributive justice. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University under the supervision of Thomas Scanlon, Frances Kamm, and Amartya Sen. Her research has been published in such journals as Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Politics, Philosophy & Economics. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she worked as a public interest lawyer.
Discussants
Luis Felipe López-Calva, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme
Jeffrey Brand, Associate Professor of Philosophy, the George Washington University
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx
We are pleased to invite you to a new webinar series, “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series will focus on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series will bring attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.
The fourth event, “Imperfect Competition on the Cathedral Floor: Labourers in London 1672-1748” will feature Judy Stephenson and Patrick Wallis. In their paper, they present a new data set for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to explore the operation of the market for unskilled construction workers, the reference occupation for long run urban wage series, at one major building site in London. They find patterns of work distribution and pay which indicate characteristics of imperfect competition, most notably high worker and job flows alongside remarkable nominal wage rigidity, and evidence of an internal labour market alongside a much shorter and more fragile working year than has been previously found. The results suggest that wages, or labour’s share of income, may resist response to changes in productivity and labour supply and demand even in the long run, and highlight that labour markets created inequalities of experience, income and returns to work before modern institutions and firms. Professor Bryan Stuart will be a discussant.
About the Speakers:
Judy Stephenson is a Professor of Construction Economics and Finance, and Economic History; a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy; and a Departmental Tutor and Director of Teaching & Learning at Bartlett CPM. She is an economic historian of early modern London, its construction industry and associated markets. She researches construction, labour markets, institutions, firms, finance and industries in London between about 1600 and 1850 and is known for her work on London and English wages between 1650 and 1800. She has published on contracts and wages, and the boundaries of the firm before 1800.
Patrick Wallis is a Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. His research explores the economic, social and medical history of Britain and Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. His two main interests are in apprenticeship and human capital and the transformation of healthcare in early modern England. He has recently published two publications, including Access to the Trade: Monopoly and Mobility in European Craft Guilds in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Journal of Social History and Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press; November 2019).
About the Discussants:
Bryan Stuart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2017 and joined George Washington University in August 2017. His research interests include labor, public, and urban economics. Recent and current projects examine the effects of recessions on individuals and local areas, the effects of government policies on labor market outcomes, and the determinants and consequences of household location decisions.
Barry Chiswick is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in Economics with Distinction from Columbia University and joined George Washington University in 2011. He has held permanent and visiting appointments at UCLA, Columbia University, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, City University (New York), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University. From 1973 to 1977, he was Senior Staff Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In addition, he served as chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee and past president of the European Society for Population Economics. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and Research in Economics of the Household and is on the editorial boards of four other academic journals. Since 2004, he has been the Program Director for Migration Studies at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany.
Thursday, June 25, 2020
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT
Zoom
From the pandemic to global social protests to economic and financial crises to the ever-more-evident impacts of climate upheaval, we are seeing in real time the consequences of decades of misguided mindsets about how systems operate. Managing systemic hazards will require a new mind-set and new principles for policy design and action.
In this webinar, IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Sunil Sharma and his co-author ASU-Thunderbird School of Global Management professor Ann Florini will discuss why and how to develop policy and business solutions to these systemic fragilities, based on principles that foster resilience.
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx
We are pleased to invite you to the third webinar of the “Facing Inequality” series, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe – especially those revealed by the current COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, within the academy and without, to present work and discuss ideas that can facilitate new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
The “Facing Inequality” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.
The climate change crisis reveals the full gamut of humanity’s failure to govern itself in ways that do not exploit nature and humans. This talk identifies what those in poverty most urgently facing the consequences of this failure can teach those must urgently trying to address it. Richly informed by ethnographies, surveys, interviews, and project assessments in 26 communities of those most effected by climate change, the talk will point toward new normative approaches to climate justice and provide a refreshed ethical map to political efficacy.
About the Speaker:
Brooke Ackerly is a Professor of Political Science, Philosophy, and Law, and Affiliated Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University and co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2018-2021). In her research, teaching, and collaborations, she works to clarify without simplifying the most pressing problems of global justice, including human rights and climate change. Using feminist methodologies, she integrates into her theoretical work empirical research on activism and the experiences of those affected by injustice (Grounded Normative Theory). See Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge 2000), Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge 2008), Doing Feminist Research with Jacqui True (Palgrave Macmillan 2010, second edition forthcoming), and most recently, Just Responsibility: A Human Rights Theory of Global Justice (Oxford University Press 2018), which won the APSA Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics.
She is currently working on the intersection of global economic, environmental, and gender justice in their material and epistemic dimensions. She teaches courses on justice, ethics and public policy, feminist theory, feminist research methods, human rights, contemporary political thought, and gender and the history of political thought. She is the winner of the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science Graduate Teaching Award and the Margaret Cuninggim Mentoring Prize. She is the founder of the Global Feminisms Collaborative, a group of scholars and activists developing ways to collaborate on applied research for social justice. She advises academics and donors on evaluation, methodology, and the ethics of research. She serves the profession through committees in her professional associations including the American Political Science Association (APSA), International Studies Association (ISA), and the European Consortium on Politics and Gender (ECPG). She currently serves on the APSA Committee for the Status of Women in the Profession. She has been a member of the editorial board for Politics and Gender (Journal of the APSA, Women and Politics Section) and is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Politics, and Politics, Gender and Identities.
Tuesday, September 17th, 2019
Yao Pan (Aalto University)
“Aladdin’s Lamp Unleashed: Successful Social Programs over Local Political Cycles”
Abstract: A social program can achieve great success in one case but not in another, and the reason is far from clear. This paper tests a new hypothesis that timing of program introduction relative to local political cycle greatly affects a program’s impact, using a government-implemented village fund program in China. Combining household-level panel data from a random experiment on loan provision and the exogenous variation in the timing of the program introduction relative to the village Party secretary’s reselection cycle, we show that the program achieves a higher loan take-up rate, better poor targeting, fewer violations, and a higher overall performance score if it is introduced in the year prior to reappointment. These divergencies are most likely driven by differences in effort levels the village fund committees put into the program and in loan terms set by them. Finally, we show villages with the program introduced in the year prior to reappointment experience higher levels of agricultural income, agricultural production assets, and food consumption. Taken together, these results signify the importance of politician’ incentives for successful social program implementation.
For information, please contact professor Remi Jedwab at jedwab@gwu.edu.
For information please contact Professor Remi Jedwab at jedwab@gwu.edu.
With the establishment of the transatlantic telegraph, information sharing in relation to international trade experienced dramatic changes and heavily impacted global markets. Looking at historical data, we can see how exporters began to respond to information about demand.
During next week’s Trade and Development Workshop, Claudia Steinwender will present her paper, Information Frictions and the Law of One Price: “When the States and the Kingdom became United”, which examines the extent to which information friction affects international trade distortion. Dr. Steinwender will explain how she built a model of international trade that is consistent with empirical evidence in which exporters use the latest news about a foreign market to forecast expected selling prices when their exports arrive.
Claudia Steinwender is an IES Fellow at the International Economics Section at Princeton University and completed her PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics. This summer, July 2015, she will be joining the Harvard Business School as an assistant professor.
Click here for flyer
with Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and Camilo Garcia-Jimeno (U Penn)
with Leopoldo Fergusson (Universidad de los Andes, James A. Robinson (Harvard University), and Ragnar Torvik (NTHU)
The paper can be found here.
The paper can be found here.
The paper can be found here.
The paper can be found here.
Co-sponsor: GWU Department of Economics
Prof. Beshkar’s Paper can be found here.
Co-sponsored with GWU Department of Economics
Download his paper here.
Hosted by the GWU Department of Economics
Hosted by the GWU Department of Economics
Download the paper here.
Co-sponsored by the GWU Department of Economics
Co-hosted with the GWU Department of Economics
