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2005-06 International Interdisciplinary Seminar (IIS) The International Interdisciplinary Seminar Series is jointly sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Provost for International Affairs, the Christopher H. Browne Center for International Politics, the PennLauder CIBER and the Management Department of the Wharton School. The goal of the seminar is to invite prominent speakers whose international research has broad resonance with faculty and graduate students in multiple schools across the University and can help foster a community of scholars interested in International Studies irrespective of disciplinary orientation. Upcoming Seminar 10:30am Friday, April 7—Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F50 Daniel Posner (UCLA Political Science) (with Macartan Humphreys, Jeremy Weinstein & James Habyarimana) "Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision? An Experimental Approach." Hosted by Witold Henisz (henisz@wharton.upenn.edu) - please contact Prof. Henisz via email if you are interested in meeting with Prof. Posner. ABSTRACT A large and growing literature links high levels of ethnic diversity with low levels of public goods provision. Yet while the empirical connection between ethnic heterogeneity and the underprovision of public goods is widely accepted, there is little consensus on the specific mechanism through which this relationship operates. Some authors emphasize the greater altruism that co-ethnics feel toward each other and the greater willingness that this provides for individuals in ethnically homogeneous communities to bear the cost of volunteering their time and energy for collective activities. Others stress the greater capacity for individuals to sanction in-group members than out-group members and the heightened ability that this provides for enforcing social cooperation in homogeneous than heterogeneous settings. Still others highlight the role that ethnicity plays as a mechanism for coordinating group actions and/or improving the productivity of collective tasks. All of these mechanisms are plausible. To date, however, no research has established which of these mechanisms is (are) “doing the work” in linking ethnic heterogeneity with low levels of public goods provision. Filling this gap in knowledge is the purpose of this paper. We distill four distinct mechanisms from this literature – what we term other regarding preferences, reciprocity/institutions, focal points, and “ethnicity as technology” – and introduce a series of experimental games that permit us to test them against one another. To do this, we recruited 300 subjects from adjacent neighborhoods in Kampala, Uganda that combined high levels of ethnic diversity with low levels of public goods provision. Each subject played a sequence of different games, each designed to isolate and test one of these four mechanisms. Subjects played multiple rounds of each game with randomized matching – sometimes with co-ethnics, sometimes with non-co-ethnics. Our strategy is to look for differences in play among co-ethnics and non-co-ethnics, and for differences in these differences across games. Effectively, we run a horserace among the four mechanisms, looking to identify the channel through which the ethnic effect is strongest. To preview our results, we find strong evidence that ethnic diversity impedes public goods provision not because of the greater degree of altruism that people feel toward co-ethnics and not because of the role ethnicity plays as a focal principle or as a technology for team production but because of within-group norms and institutions that facilitate the sanctioning of individuals who fail to contribute to the collective endeavor. These results provide some of the first empirical evidence for why ethnic heterogeneity undermines collective action, and for why ethnically diverse communities tend to suffer from such low levels of public goods provision and well-being. Forthcoming Seminars 10:30am Friday, April 28—LOCATION TBD William Easterly (NYU Economics) “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good” Hosted by Howard Pack (packh@wharton.upenn.edu) - please contact Prof. Pack via email if you are interested in meeting with Prof. Easterly. Past Seminars 10:30am Friday, October 7 – Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F55 ABSTRACT 10:30am Friday, October 28 – Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F55 "Monitoring Global Financial Stability" Background Paper #1 Background Paper #2 10:30am Friday, November 18 – Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F55 Title “Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies” JOINTLY SPONSORED BY PENN COMPARATIVE POLITICS WORKSHOP Background Readings Chapter 1 (Introduction) of “How Institutions Evolve” Chapter 6 (Conclusion) of “How Institutions Evolve” Local host Tulia Falleti (Penn Political Science). To schedule a meeting with Kathy, please email Tulia at !!!*****CANCELED*****!!! 10:30am Friday, December 2 - Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F60 Title “Counting Chickens When They Hatch: The Short-term Effect of Aid on Growth” By: Michael A. Clemens, Steve Radelet, Rikhil Bhavani ABSTRACT Past research on aid and growth is flawed because it typically examines the impact of ag- gregate aid on growth over a short period, usually four years, while significant portions of aid are unlikely to affect growth in such a brief time. We divide aid into three categories: (1) emergency and humanitarian aid (likely to be negatively correlated with growth); (2) aid that affects growth only over a long period of time, if at all, such as aid to support democracy, the environment, health, or education (likely to have no relationship to growth over four years); and (3) aid that plausibly could stimulate growth in four years, including budget and balance of pay- ments support, investments in infrastructure, and aid for productive sectors such as agriculture and industry. Our focus is on the third group, which accounts for about 53% of all aid flows. We find a positive, causal relationship between this “short-impact” aid and economic growth (with diminishing returns) over a four-year period. The impact is large: at least two-to-three times larger than in studies using aggregate aid. Even at a conservatively high discount rate, at the mean a $1 increase in short-impact aid raises output (and income) by $1.64 in present value in the typical country. From a different perspective, we find that higher-than-average short-impact aid to sub-Saharan Africa raised per capita growth rates there by about half a percentage point over the growth that would have been achieved by average aid flows. The results are highly statistically significant and stand up to a demanding array of tests, including various specifications, endogeneity structures, and treatment of influential observations. The basic result does not depend crucially on a recipient’s level of income or quality of institutions and policies; we find that short-impact aid causes growth, on average, regardless of these char- acteristics. However, we find some evidence that the impact on growth is somewhat larger in countries with stronger institutions or longer life expectancies (better health). We also find a significant negative relationship between debt repayments and growth. We make no statement on, and do not attempt to measure, any additional effect on growth from other categories of aid (e.g., emergency assistance or aid that might affect growth over a longer time period); four-year panel regressions are not an appropriate tool to examine those relationships 10:30am Friday, January 13—Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F50 Peter Gourevitch (UCSD IRPS) Title "The Political Economy of Institutional Investors in Corporate Governance" Additional background chapters from recent book available here: Chs 1-2 ABSTRACT Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another. HOSTED BY Gerald McDermott (mcdermott@wharton.upenn.edu) – please contact Prof. McDermott if you are interested in meeting with Prof. Gourevitch. 10:30am Friday, February 24—Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F50 Jonathan Zeitlin (University of Wisconsin—Madison, Sociology) Title “Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist Governance in the European Union” ABSTRACT Wrestling with massive rapid expansion, buffeted by economic globalization and demographic change, provoked by a bumbling effort to normalize its constitutional status, the European Union is today in crisis, and will likely remain so for several years to come. The outcome of that crisis is unforeseeable, but any outcome short of a radical uprooting of administrative, judicial, and professional dispositions that have been decades in the making is likely to leave intact the novel pattern of rule making characteristic of governance in the EU. Paradoxically, it is precisely the distance from the world of parties, parliaments, and referenda that contributes to suspicion about the legitimacy of the EU which also protects some of its core institutions from political turbulence. Total disaster aside, what was true of EU governance yesterday is likely to be true tomorrow and the day after. This essay is directed to analysis of the distinctive and surprisingly effective innovations that have emerged in EU governance in the frank hope if not expectation that a clear appreciation of these can usefully inform the next round of efforts to render the institutions of European decision-making comprehensible and democratically accountable. Hosted by Witold Henisz (henisz@wharton.upenn.edu) - please contact Prof. Henisz if you are interested in meeting with Prof. Zeitlin 10:30am Friday, March 17—Huntsman Hall (JMHH) F50 Hilton Root (Pitzer College Economics) Talk based on new book “Capital and Collusion: Political Logic of Global Economic Development” Hosted by Witold Henisz (henisz@wharton.upenn.edu) - please contact Prof. Henisz if you are interested in meeting with Prof. Root. |
