Williamsburg, VA: AidData at William & Mary,
January 5, 2023
The Chinese government is revolutionizing digital surveillance at home. Are digital technology transfers from Huawei, China’s leading information technology company, enabling recipient governments to expand their digital surveillance operations and engage in more targeted repression against dissidents?
A large firm survey shows that labor conflicts in Ethiopia are more frequent in foreign-owned firms, especially those that are Chinese-owned. Foreign firms hire similarly educated and experienced workers, while offering similar salaries and benefits. We draw on case studies to explore reasons why foreign, and especially Chinese-owned firms, face exceptional levels of labor conflict. Misaligned perceptions about the role of local labor laws may be an important driver of conflict.
This book created the field of the law of democracy, offering a systematic account of the legal construction of American democracy. This edition represents a significant revision that reflects the embattled state of democracy in the U.S. and abroad.
National Bureau of Economic Research,
June 14, 2022
A new method to test for efficient risk pooling allows for intertemporal smoothing, non-homothetic consumption, and heterogeneous risk and time preferences.
This article examines the consequences of the opium concession system in the Dutch East Indies—a nineteenth-century institution through which the Dutch would auction the monopolistic right to sell opium in a given locality.
A study examining the BRI through the lens of the obsolescing bargain to evaluate the practices of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and policy banks in mitigating political risk.
Pascaline Dupas and co-authors Agness, Baseler, Chassang, and Snowberg leverage individual choice data they generate on farmers in western Kenya to solve a general problem: do behavioral phenomena drive individual choices when trading off cash for time, or cash and time for goods?
Journal of Historical Political Economy,
February 21, 2022
In a new paper for the Journal of Historical Political Economy, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Saumitra Jha examine the conditions under which indigenous communities in Mexico were able to overcome the onslaught of disease and violence that they faced.
In his final essay as co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, Larry Diamond calls this moment the darkest for freedom in a half-century. Whether democracy regains its footing will depend on how democratic leaders and citizens respond to emboldened authoritarians and divisions within their own societies.
Nate Grubman shows how the repeated failures of Tunisia’s once-promising democratic transition created a crisis ripe for exploitation by a populist outsider
