Political Economy Futures Forum
Weekly Research Seminar
The key activity is the weekly PEFF Research Seminar. The seminars build community across the scope of PEFF research and help participants develop excellent research in a collegial environment. We particularly welcome cross-disciplinary contributions from early career researchers and scholars from underrepresented groups. By fostering close connections, the PEFF seminar will, in turn, lead to the development of significant funding bids, especially by developing interdisciplinary capacity to answer targeted thematic funding calls. Responsibility for organizing the seminar rotates across the four clusters. We ensure accessibility and inclusion by encouraging cross-cluster attendance. Moreover, all seminars will run in a hybrid format.
Weekly seminars take place on Wednesdays from 3-4:30PM. See below for seminar topics & abstracts.
Upcoming Seminars
22 January - “Mobilising for Local Energy Justice in the United States: Confronting Political Lock-in and Private Capture in the Campaign for Public Power"
Paper: Grace Brown (ASBS) “Mobilising for Local Energy Justice in the United States: Confronting Political Lock-in and Private Capture in the Campaign for Public Power”
Wed. 22 January 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
Abstract: Across the United States, there is a growing grassroots movement for ‘public power’: manifesting in local and regional campaigns to take privatised energy utilities and infrastructures into public ownership and control. These campaigns utilise explicitly pro-public messaging to link everyday customer service concerns with broader questions of climate action and racial and economic justice. While there have been some notable achievements in local energy democracy, such as the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act (2023) in New York State after a four-year grassroots campaign, on the whole, these mobilisations have not translated into successful efforts to transform the energy system in the US. Despite public frustration with investor-owned utilities – especially in terms of high energy prices, reliability issues, and environmental negligence – the US energy system remains locked into privatisation and marketisation processes. In attempting to challenge these processes, campaigns for public power confront significant structural barriers, including corporate influence in the political system, regulatory constraints, and opposition from key stakeholders, including some labour unions.
There is a ‘regime of obstruction’ blocking energy democracy (Carroll, 2021) operating at different geographical scales, from the federal through state to the local, where powerful political and economic actors continue to ensure a ‘lock-in’ to neoliberal governance, despite its many contradictions and failings. In this paper, we explore these persistent tensions and problems, while also highlighting the trans-local learning processes that run alongside these campaigns in their attempts to tackle spatial and social injustices and transition towards more public and democratic energy regimes.
We illustrate our arguments by drawing upon recent fieldwork (undertaken in 2022-4) from two recent grassroots campaigns to municipalise the energy grid through the creation of community- and publicly owned utilities: a statewide campaign in Maine and one at city level in Rochester, New York.
There is a ‘regime of obstruction’ blocking energy democracy (Carroll, 2021) operating at different geographical scales, from the federal through state to the local, where powerful political and economic actors continue to ensure a ‘lock-in’ to neoliberal governance, despite its many contradictions and failings. In this paper, we explore these persistent tensions and problems, while also highlighting the trans-local learning processes that run alongside these campaigns in their attempts to tackle spatial and social injustices and transition towards more public and democratic energy regimes.
We illustrate our arguments by drawing upon recent fieldwork (undertaken in 2022-4) from two recent grassroots campaigns to municipalise the energy grid through the creation of community- and publicly owned utilities: a statewide campaign in Maine and one at city level in Rochester, New York.
29 January - “A political ecology critique of China’s developmentalist paradigm of climate governance"
Paper: Mingzhe Zhu (Law) "A political ecology critique of China’s developmentalist paradigm of climate governance"
Wed. 29 January 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Law & Political Economy cluster
Abstract: Since the 1980s, China has developed a developmentalist approach to climate governance. This approach is characterized primarily by framing climate change as a development issue rather than an environmental one. The state delegates the authority for formulating and implementing climate policy to the developmental and industrial departments of the executive branch. This allows them to integrate extensive green public investments with coercive institutional and legal measures to reshape the energy and industrial sectors. This paradigm is further justified by its potential to achieve both decarbonization and economic growth that particularly benefits underdeveloped regions. While China’s climate ambitions and accomplishments are widely recognized both domestically and internationally, the implementation of its climate policies risks exacerbating social inequalities.
5 February - “Of Causality and Comparability: How Impact Evaluations Influenced Hybrid Organizing in Global Development”
Paper: Saurabh Lall (ASBS) “Of Causality and Comparability: How Impact Evaluations Influenced Hybrid Organizing in Global Development"
Wed. 5 February 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
Abstract: Tackling grand challenges like poverty and climate change through hybrid fields like impact investing and social enterprise necessitates measuring impact. There is a tradition of measuring social impact through impact evaluations in the public and nonprofit sectors, which has recently been adapted to hybrid organizations. While there are many efforts to compare social performance, there is relatively less attention to answering underlying questions of causality, and how impact evaluations have informed organizing in hybrid fields. I use extensive archival data and observations from practitioner events to develop case studies of two impact investing sectors – microfinance and long-lasting insecticide nets. I draw on scholarship in program evaluation to develop a temporal model with four stages – construction, contestation, consensus, and conversion, to illustrate how impact evaluations have changed both normative and causal program theory in hybrid fields. My research has implications for scholarship in social impact measurement and hybrid organizations and fields.
12 February - “The Ascent of the Prudent Man: Trusteeship and the Legal Origins of Financialization”
Paper: Sean Vanatta (SPS) “The Ascent of the Prudent Man: Trusteeship and the Legal Origins of Financialization"
Wed. 12 February 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 223 ‖ Law & Political Economy cluster
Abstract: In the years after World War II, an alliance of lawyers and bankers rewrote the laws governing trust investments in the United States, a campaign that transformed American finance. The changes focused on state-level rules that determined how trustees—who oversaw estates, surplus corporate capital, and blossoming pension funds—could invest funds entrusted to their care. Before the war, most states followed New York’s “legal list” model. Legislatures and courts created strict criteria for permissible investments. These tended to be safe, low-yielding assets, like government bonds, mortgages, and corporate bonds meeting specific criteria. By contrast, Massachusetts and a few outliers followed the “prudent man” rule, which enabled trustees to invest “how men of prudence, discretion and intelligence manage their own affairs.” Here, trustees could invest not only in safe assets, but also in corporate bonds, stocks, and more exotic securities.
Seeking to enhance their power over investment portfolios, in the late 1930s organized bankers and lawyers launched a sustained campaign to reframe trusteeship around the figure of the prudent man, supplanting government-mandated investments with the judgement of private fiduciaries. Over the 1940s and 1950s, the rule supplanted the legal list model in most states.
State prudent man rules elevated prudent men—trust lawyers, bankers, investment advisers—granting them substantial authority over socially consequential capital allocation decisions that had, under the legal list model, resided in government officials. More broadly, the ideology of the prudent man led public and private investors to pursue maximal individual returns, to downplay systemic risk, and to reject public-spirited tradeoffs (effects especially visible, the paper will show, in public employee pension plans). The ascent of the prudent man was, in the last analysis, a formative vector of financialization.
Seeking to enhance their power over investment portfolios, in the late 1930s organized bankers and lawyers launched a sustained campaign to reframe trusteeship around the figure of the prudent man, supplanting government-mandated investments with the judgement of private fiduciaries. Over the 1940s and 1950s, the rule supplanted the legal list model in most states.
State prudent man rules elevated prudent men—trust lawyers, bankers, investment advisers—granting them substantial authority over socially consequential capital allocation decisions that had, under the legal list model, resided in government officials. More broadly, the ideology of the prudent man led public and private investors to pursue maximal individual returns, to downplay systemic risk, and to reject public-spirited tradeoffs (effects especially visible, the paper will show, in public employee pension plans). The ascent of the prudent man was, in the last analysis, a formative vector of financialization.
19 February - “The UK councils service provision, the neoliberal model and beyond”
Paper: Bilge Serin (SPS) "The UK councils service provision, the neoliberal model and beyond"
Wed. 19 February 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
Abstract: FORTHCOMING
26 February - “Why are investors in a war committed with ‘genocidal intent’ bucking bond markets? Patriotism, Rational Calculation or Religious Passion”
Paper: Dania Thomas (ASBS) "Why are investors in a war committed with ‘genocidal intent’ bucking bond markets? Patriotism, Rational Calculation or Religious Passion”
Wed. 26 February 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
Abstract: This paper analyzes the contrasting trends in Israel's bond financing post the October 2023 Hamas attack. While retail investors, particularly in the US, have increased their investments in Israel Bonds, driven by a mix of patriotism and high-yield returns, commercial bond markets have shown caution, reflected in rating downgrades and rising interest rates. This discrepancy raises questions about the underlying motivations for investing in Israel Bonds, particularly in light of the ongoing conflict and international condemnation of Israel's actions. The paper explores whether the appetite for these bonds can be attributed to a religious and political investment in a future Judeo-Christian state, rather than solely economic or patriotic factors.
5 March- “Global Threads: Sustainability, Indigeneity, and the Global Wool Trade in Peru"
Paper: Laura Bunt-Macrury (SPS) “Global Threads: Sustainability, Indigeneity, and the Global Wool Trade in Peru"
Wed. 5 March 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
Abstract: The global wool trade is at a crossroads, where sustainability, luxury, and climate change intersect with historical patterns of world trade. This presentation explores Global Threads, a working project examining how Peru’s indigenous communities are reshaping their role in global wool supply chains amidst increasing demand for wool as both a sustainable and luxury commodity. For the first time, indigenous peasant communities (campesinos) are in direct dialogue with multinational corporations (MNCs) and international organizations regarding the production and sale of wool, marking a significant shift in their economic and political agency.
12 March - "Towards a Legal Theory of Prices"
Paper: Anna Chadwick (Law) "Towards a Legal Theory of Prices"
Wed. 12 March 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 223 ‖ Law & Political Economy cluster
Abstract: The analysis of prices is an activity that has traditionally taken place within the domain of Economics, and legal scholars have had very little to say about how prices are formed. Yet as the impacts of price spikes for resources like oil or gas, the effects of long-standing inequalities relating to the terms of international trade, the contentious practice of pricing of sovereign debt, or the current cost-of-living crisis all underline, prices have significant implications for a matter with which lawyers have traditionally been concerned: justice.
Legal institutions are increasingly understood by economic sociologists and institutionalist economists to be of critical importance in processes of price formation, yet there has been no systematic attempt to understand the role of law in the formation of prices. In this paper, I build on important foundations around ‘the just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing an alternative theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective. I identify and critically discuss four different ways of analysing the role of law in processes of price formation that take as their point of departure the following intellectual traditions: I) New Institutional Economics, II) Economic Sociology, III) Law and Political Economy, and IV) Marxist Economics. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of distinct legal-theoretical perspectives on the engineering of prices, I reflect on whether it is possible to advance a legal theory of prices that is both sociologically convincing and that also has explanatory power.
Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices any more ‘just’?
Legal institutions are increasingly understood by economic sociologists and institutionalist economists to be of critical importance in processes of price formation, yet there has been no systematic attempt to understand the role of law in the formation of prices. In this paper, I build on important foundations around ‘the just price’ to evaluate the potential of developing an alternative theoretical approach to analysing prices from a legal perspective. I identify and critically discuss four different ways of analysing the role of law in processes of price formation that take as their point of departure the following intellectual traditions: I) New Institutional Economics, II) Economic Sociology, III) Law and Political Economy, and IV) Marxist Economics. In addition to offering a comparative analysis of distinct legal-theoretical perspectives on the engineering of prices, I reflect on whether it is possible to advance a legal theory of prices that is both sociologically convincing and that also has explanatory power.
Prices govern peoples’ lives and dictate courses of action to elected governments, often entrenching and exacerbating inequalities. Can a greater understanding of their legal engineering open up any avenues to making prices any more ‘just’?
19 March - "Circular clothing innovation project"
Paper: Lynn Wilson (ASBS) "Circular clothing innovation project"
Wed. 19 March 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
Abstract: FORTHCOMING
Previous Seminars
2 October - “The Price of the Past: Examining the Consequences of Odious Debt”
Paper: Patrick Shea (SPS), “The Price of the Past: Examining the Consequences of Odious Debt”
Discussant: Dania Thomas (ASBS)
Wed. 2 October 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
Abstract: Abstract: Why do leaders rarely invoke odious debt claims despite their apparent domestic and moral appeal? Blaming past dictators or colonial powers for debt burdens could garner popular support and potentially alleviate financial pressures. Yet, despite their potential for political popularity, such claims are rarely made in practice. This study explores this puzzle, arguing that the international financial consequences of odious debt claims deter leaders from employing this strategy. We argue that these claims not only cast doubt on a country's commitment to its current debt obligations but also signal potential issues with future borrowing, leading to adverse reactions in credit markets. To overcome the empirical challenge posed by leaders' strategic avoidance of these claims, we examine Norway's unique 2006 debt relief action. Norway unilaterally forgave the debts of five countries, explicitly labeling the original loans as ``illegitimate." This action effectively imposed an odious debt claim on these states, bypassing the usual leader-driven process. By comparing these countries to others receiving conventional Norwegian debt relief, we isolate the impact of the ``illegitimate debt" framing. While Norway’s intentions were ostensibly well-intentioned, our analysis reveals that this program restricted the forgiven states’ credit access and increased their bond yield spreads by 300 basis points. This study contributes to understanding sovereign debt politics and the implications of challenging established international political norms.
Hybrid participation available here: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/89416161281?pwd=WHhhSDVZOUNFcXRtYXJKUmZEa0RJQT09
9 October - “Institutional Pressures and Who Gets Believed, Trusted, and Dismissed”
Paper: Melea Press (ASBS), “Institutional Pressures and Who Gets Believed, Trusted, and Dismissed”
Wed. 9 October 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 237C ‖ Law & Political Economy cluster
Abstract: Excluded, marginalized and vulnerable groups are routinely distrusted, accused, and dismissed. They are blamed, shamed and gaslighted. This project would explore the mechanisms of institutional exclusion and the ways that individuals attempt to combat the external assessment of themselves. This builds on the work of Fricker (2007; 2024) by highlighting how social injustice is embedded in the enactment of institutional structures, how vulnerable individuals would like to respond and how they actually respond given the constraints imposed by power differentials.
16 October - "Business power in populist times: democratic defender, populist enabler or quiet bystander?"
Paper: Kelly Kollman (PIS/IPED), "Business power in populist times: democratic defender, populist enabler or quiet bystander?"
Wed. 16 October 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 223 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
Abstract: To what extent and in what ways has business—individual firms and their collective associations—mobilised to support, counter or accommodate radical right movements since the financial crisis in different capitalist democracies? The project addresses these questions and seeks to elucidate differential business responses by developing a novel analytical framework that marries contemporary research on business and far-right parties with older scholarship that examined how socio-economic groups structured national responses to past crises. The latter lends contemporary researchers two crucial insights. First, business actors’ response to political upheaval is shaped by the potential coalition partners available within the national economies and society. Second, economic crises unmake established political coalitions and open opportunities for new alliances and bargains to form. I use this framework to compare developments in three contemporary democracies: Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom. In each country I compare three aspects of business (non)engagement with radical right parties: (1) during elections (2) lobbying on policies championed by right-wing populists (3) coalition-building to promote these political goals.
23 October - "Spatial Justice in Climate Adaptation: River edge ownership considerations" Dr Mingzhe Zhu
Paper: Kat Fradera (Law/ GALLANT), "Spatial Justice in Climate Adaptation: River edge ownership considerations"
Discussant: Mingzhe Zhu
Wed. 23 October 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 223 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
Abstract:
Our river edges and coastlines are changing. With sea levels rising, and continued coastal protection often financially and practically unviable, increasing thought is being given to managing a retreat from vulnerable areas along urban river edges and coast lines.
30 October - "Sharing is caring until hard times hit? How economic crises affect states’ funding for international organizations"
Paper: Giuseppe Zaccaria (PIS/IR) "Sharing is caring until hard times hit? How economic crises affect states’ funding for international organizations"
Wed. 30 October 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
Abstract: This article examines whether and how economic crises in donor states affect their multilateral funding. More specifically, the article focuses on the effect of monetary, financial, and banking crises on the volume of earmarked funding provided to multilateral institutions and the degree of earmarking attached to those funds by donor states. To test its expectations, the article relies on data on multilateral funding flows and economic crises in donor states between 1990 and 2020. The results show that economic crises are associated with less earmarked funding as well as stricter earmarking by donors. The results also suggest that donor-considerations towards earmarked funding during economically challenging times may vary according to their relations with recipient countries and the perceived domestic consequences of crises. The results have implications for scholars of financing in the multilateral system as well as practitioners.
6 November - "Neoliberal despotism and coercive totalization: an ethnography of the Bangladeshi garment industry"
Paper: Chandana Alawattage (ASBS) "Neoliberal despotism and coercive totalization: an ethnography of the Bangladeshi garment industry"
Wed. 6 November 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladeshi garment factories, this study advances a nuanced political analysis of despotic labour control as a fundamental component of neoliberal production regimes in the Global South. The empirical evidence reveals that ‘coercive totalism’ underpins despotism at the point of production through a specific set of market, political and cultural apparatuses. Neoliberal despotism constructs the structural conditions for the coercive totalization of space, body and time, enabling the relentless pursuit of production targets, adherence to quality standards and expedited delivery schedules—all whilst minimizing costs. In the context of a weakened bureaucratic nation-state lacking the capacity to safeguard labour and human rights, the emergence of a mastaanocratic shadow state manifests itself within the manufacturing milieu. This mastanocratic framework engenders a factory-slum topography, wherein ghettoized labour is sustained through the exercise of coercive totalization facilitated by power dynamics, legal enactments, police surveillance, and violence, alongside an ingrained cultural hierarchy of paternalism. This study argues that the neoliberal market necessitates despotism, whilst despotism, in turn, sustains the neoliberal market. Within this interrelation, coercive totalization is rationalized as a prevailing mechanism through which competitive market forces extract profit, thereby derealizing labor from the precariousness of its existence.
13 November - "Judicialization as Contestation. Ecocide, the Small Island States and the International Politics of Environmental Justice"
Paper: Ulrike Zeigermann & Philipp Gieg, University of Würzburg "Judicialization as Contestation. Ecocide, the Small Island States and the International Politics of Environmental Justice"
Discussant: Dr Lorenzo Crippa, Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, incoming lecturer at the University of Strathclyde.
Wed. 13 November 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 237C ‖ Law and Political Economy cluster
Abstract:
Over the past decade, the reemerging debate about the introduction of ecocide as an international crime has brought about increasing scholarly and public debate. Small Island States have played a major role in this debate arguing for sanctioning and codifying widespread and long-term environmental harm in international criminal law. While the diversity among the Small Island States must be recognized, we show that activists from local communities, but also public representatives of these countries have challenged existing international legal frameworks for dealing with environmental harms. With a qualitative document analysis, we scrutinize the agency of the Small Island States involved in global power dynamics around the judicialization of ecocide.
Based on our empirical analysis of public protocols, statements, reports and policy papers, we argue that the ‘unlikely pioneership’ of the Small Island States in international criminal environmental law can be conceptualized and analyzed as norm contestation revealing the “agency of the governed”. By discursively disapproving international norms – either regarding their validity per se (justificatory contestation), or regarding their general (applicatory contestation) or situational application (situative contestation) –, these actors formerly perceived as mere ‘norm takers’ have become norm entrepreneurs, actively shaping the international normative fabric.
20 November- “If we had just stood outside City Hall w/ banners saying ‘MUNICIPALISE NOW!’ it wouldn’t have worked”: Labour, deprivatisation & the conjuncture"
Paper: Beth Pearson (ASBS) “If we had just stood outside City Hall with banners saying ‘MUNICIPALISE NOW!’ it wouldn’t have worked”: Labour, deprivatisation and the conjuncture"
Discussant: Brian Robertson, UNITE City of Edinburgh Council branch
Wed. 20 November 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Public & Collective Ownership cluster
Abstract: There has been growing interest in using conjunctural theory to understand the mutating processes of neoliberalism and the ability of progressive actors to forge transformative change at the local level; particularly in the possibilities of this for democracy, participation, and sustainable cities. Existing work has positioned processes of de-privatisation and remunicipalisation in a conjunctural framing arguing that these developments should be situated as a critical current moment in a longer set of economic, social, and political processes linked to ongoing neoliberalisation. To date, however, there has been little attempt to position labour and trade union actors in these debates. The labour movement has played a key, if uneven and sometimes ambivalent, role in the growing and global wave of remunicipalisation of local public services. Existing scholarship on trade union renewal draws attention to both internal and external factors in shaping union strategy and reconceptualises renewal as a multifaceted transition, highlighting short-term adaptability. Based on interviews with key actors and campaigns at UK trade unions engaged in insourcing or de-privatisation campaigns, this paper engages with union renewal scholarship, but also widens and deepens the lens further towards an analysis that draws attention to longstanding neoliberal dynamics in the UK and the positioning of union actors in adapting to contemporary processes of neoliberal mutation.
27 November - "Credit and Voting"
Discussant: Saurabh Lall
Wed. 27 November 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
Abstract: We investigate how credit constraints for subprime borrowers affect political polarization in the U.S. Using proprietary data on credit reports for 1% of the U.S. population over 15 years, we detect exogenous discontinuities in access to credit. We combine this data with Congressional elections and find that more credit-constrained individuals increase the Republican vote share. We rationalize this finding through political alignment among Republicans for laxer regulation of credit and mortgage markets. Our results are robust to trade exposure.
4 December- "Are we nearly there yet? The struggle to end a century of international corporate tax misgovernance"
Paper: Alex Cobham (Tax Justice Network) "Are we nearly there yet? The struggle to end a century of international corporate tax misgovernance"
Wed. 4 December 2024 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Corporate Accountability cluster
Abstract: In the 1920s, the imperial powers began to set international tax rules at the League of Nations. Their decisions, and the exclusion of most countries of the world from rule-setting, set the template for the century that followed. Attempts to establish the United Nations as the more inclusive forum for rule-setting on tax matters and on the wider regulation of multinationals, including accounting standards, were repeatedly thwarted by the erstwhile League of Nations members, including through the establishment of the OECD in 1960 to take on its mantle. But the scale of tax abuse by multinational companies has exploded since the 1990s, gradually bringing even the OECD’s members to demand meaningful reform. That reform process, however, has since its inception in 2013 failed to make any dent in the scale of tax abuse. For that reason, it has been possible for the first time to move forward proposals for a UN framework convention on international tax cooperation – which would not only deliver specific rules and standards, but more importantly provide a globally inclusive forum for future decision-making. The concerted resistance of a handful of OECD members including the UK and US may yet prove a serious obstacle; but the negotiation of the UN convention over the next three years provides the prospect of an unprecedented overhaul of international tax governance.
15 January - “Bribes and Bureaucracy: When Administrative Burdens Become Corruption Catalysts for Firms”
CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS
Paper: Denisse Rodriguez-Olivari (ASBS) “Bribes and Bureaucracy: When Administrative Burdens Become Corruption Catalysts for Firms”
Discussant: Wei Yang (ASBS)
Wed. 15 January 2025 ‖ 3:00-4:30pm ‖ ARC 225 ‖ Global Political Economy cluster
Abstract: In many interactions between businesses and governments, firms resort to bribing officials to navigate actual or perceived operational barriers. From the government’s perspective, two factors enable this phenomenon: administrative burdens and officials’ discretionary powers. This paper focuses on the former administrative burdens, testing the ‘grease-the-wheels’ hypothesis using previously untapped firm-level survey data from 169,959 companies across 141 countries (both developed and developing) between 2006 and 2022. Specifically, we examine business licensing requirements, analyzing the time it takes firms to obtain operating licenses and how much they perceive regulations as obstacles. Our results show a significant positive correlation between administrative burdens and bribery practices, comparing firms within the same country, wave, and sector. These findings have implications for both theory and practice: (a) they highlight the importance of minimizing administrative burdens that incentivize bribery, and (b) they suggest that addressing administrative inefficiencies/burdens could have broad applicability across different political and economic contexts.