Stanford University

Economic Affairs

Does Education Change Political Attitudes? Evidence from a Kenyan School Experiment

-

Edward Miguel received his PhD at Harvard in 2000, the same year he joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2005. He recently received the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in Health Economics for "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities" (with Michael Kremer), which appeared in Econometrica. He also was the recipient of the 2005 Sloan Fellowship. At Berkeley he has received the Best Graduate Adviser Award and the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Miguel is co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources, associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics and Review of Economics and Statistics, director of the U.C. Berkeley Scientific Evaluation for Global Action program, co-organizer for Working Group in African Political Economy, associate director at CIDER, an NBER faculty research associate, a CEPR research fellow, a senior fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a research affiliate at the MIT Poverty Action Lab. He also has worked as a consultant for non-governmental organizations on projects in Delhi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone.

CISAC Conference Room

Ted Miguel Professor of Economics Speaker University of California at Berkeley
Seminars

What is 'Putin's Plan'?

-

Andrew Kuchins is a senior fellow and director of the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program. From 2000 to 2006, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was director of its Russian and Eurasian Program in Washington, D.C., from 2000 to 2003 and again in 2006, and director of the Carnegie Moscow Center in Russia from 2003 to 2005. Kuchins conducts research and writes widely on Russian foreign and security policy. He is working on a book titled China and Russia: Strategic Partners, Allies, or Competitors, and coedited, with Dmitri Trenin, Russia: The Next Ten Years (Carnegie, 2004).

Kuchins has taught at Georgetown University and Stanford University. From 1997 to 2000, he was associate director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also served as a senior program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation from 1993 to 1997, where he developed and managed a grant-making program to support scientists and researchers in the former Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1993, he was executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program on Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies.

He is a member of the editorial boards of Pro et Contra and Demokratizatsia and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1995 to 2000. He holds a B.A. from Amherst College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

CISAC Conference Room

Andrew Kuchins Director and Senior Fellow Speaker Russia and Eurasia Program
Seminars

CDDRL has concluded its third year of the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program

News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) has concluded its third year of the Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development Program held July 30th-August 17th, 2007.

This year's summer fellows program brought 26 leaders from 22 different countries in transition to Stanford for the three-week program. The fellows combined theory with practice as they studied democracy, development, and the rule of law and the links and interactions among the three areas. Not only did the fellows participate in morning seminars with leading Stanford faculty, but they also attended talks by keynote speakers including Carl Gershman and Judge Pamela Rymer to name a few. Furthermore, this year's summer fellows engaged in group discussions and presentations on key issues of democracy, development, and rule of law within their countries and regions. Fellows brought their experiences and knowledge from a wide background of different professions to the discussions and presented their proposals for addressing real-world problems of democratic and economic development.

Throughout their three-week stay, fellows enjoyed the surrounding Bay Area attractions including San Francisco and Monterey, and had the opportunity to visit institutions such as Google, the San Francisco Chronicle, and KQED Radio. The program closed with a graduation dinner on August 17th, 2007 and fellows departed, eager to put to practice what they had gained from their three-week interaction with each other, with the Stanford faculty, and with visiting speakers.

All News button
1

Ethical and Economic Case for Global Redistribution

-

Branko Milanovic is lead economist in the World Bank research group and visiting professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was a World Bank country economist for Poland and a research fellow at the Institute of Economic Sciences in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1987 from Belgrade University.

Milanovic is an expert in economies in transition, income distribution, and globalization.

Recent publications include: Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality (Princeton, 2005); Income and Influence: Social Policy and Emerging Economies, with Ethan Kapstein (Russell Sage, 2002); Inequality and Poverty During the Transition From Market Economy (World Bank, 1998).

Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Branko Milanovic Lead Economist Speaker World Bank
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Applying the Odious Debts Doctrine While Preserving Legitimate Lending

-

Abstract of Seema Jayachandran's "Applying the Odious Debts Doctrine while Preserving Legitimate Lending":

Odious debts are debts incurred by the government of a nation without either popular consent or a legitimate public purpose. While there is some debate within academic circles as to whether the successor government to a regime which incurred odious debts has the right to repudiate repayment, in the real world this is currently not an option granted legitimacy either by global capital markets or the legal systems of creditor states. There are compelling reasons to reform the law of odious debts to allow for such a repudiation in citizens of a tyrant to repay their oppressor's personal debts, but the burden of odious-debt servicing can perpetuate the cycle of state failure which has direct national security consequences. In addition, a properly designed odious debt reform could function as an alternative sanctions mechanism to trade sanctions with fewer harmful implications for the general population of the targeted state. Classical proponents of odious debt reform advocate for recognition of a legal rule under which successor governments could challenge the validity of debts incurred by prior regimes against the odious debt legal standard in a judicial-style forum. We make the case for an alternative "Due Diligence" model of reform which provides far greater ex ante certaining for lenders both as to which investments from subsequent invalidation. The Due Diligence Model also solves certain time-consistency problems inherent to the Classical model.

Seema Jayachandran is assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard University. She specializes in development economics, labor economics, and political economy.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center

Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Seema Jayachandran Assistant Professor of Economics Speaker Stanford University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Beyond Corporate Codes of Conduct: Work Organization and Labor Standards in Two Mexican Garment Factories

-

Abstract

This paper presents a matched pair case study of two factories supplying Nike, the world's largest athletic footwear and apparel company. These two factories have many similarities - both are in Mexico, both are in the apparel industry, both produce more or less the same products for Nike (and other brands) and both are subject to the same code of conduct. On the surface, both factories appear to have similar employment (i.e., recruitment, training, remuneration) practices and they receive comparable scores when audited by Nike's compliance staff. However, actual labor conditions exist between these two factories. What drives these differences in working conditions? What does this imply for traditional systems of monitoring and codes of conduct? Field research conducted at these two factories reveals that beyond the code of conduct and various monitoring efforts aimed at enforcing it, workplace conditions and labor standards are shaped by very different patterns of work organization and human resource management policies.

Richard Locke is professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is also faculty director of the MIT Sloan Fellows program and co-director of the MIT Italy program. His research focuses on economic development, comparative labor relations, and political economy.

Sponsored by the Program on Global Justice and the Stanford Humanities Center

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Richard Locke Professor of Political Science, Director of Sloan Fellows Program, and Co-director of Italy Program Speaker Massacusetts Institute of Technology
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

The Century of Education

-

Fabrice Murtin will be a postdoctoral fellow with Stanford's Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from Paris-Jourdan Sciences Économiques and, from 2005-2007, served as visiting researcher at the London School of Economics.

He will discuss his paper, written with Christian Morrisson, "Education Inequalities and the Kuznets Curves: A Global Perspective Since 1870."

Abstract

This paper presents a new dataset on educational attainment (primary, secondary and tertiary schooling) at the world level since 1870. Inequality in years of schooling is found to be rapidly decreasing, but we show that this result is completely driven by the decline in illiteracy. Then, we turn to inequality in human capital and focus on Mincerian production function that accounts for diminishing returns to schooling. It explains the negative cross-country correlation between Mincerian returns to schooling and average schooling contrary to other functional forms. As a result, we show that world human capital inequality has increased since 1870, but does not exceed 10% of world income inequality. Next, we analyse the relationships between the national distributions of income and schooling. We show that human capital within countries exhibits the inverted U-shaped curve with respect to average schooling, namely a "Kuznets curve of education." We find that the usual Kuznets curve of income inequality is significant both in pooled and fixed-effects regressions over the period 1870-2000, and is robust to the inclusion of other variables in the regression such as schooling and human capital inequality. However, the "Kuznets effect" associated to GDP per capita is 4 times smaller in magnitude than the externality of average schooling favouring the decrease of income inequality within countries since 1870.

Cosponsored by the Political Theory Workshop.

Download pdf

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Fabrice Murtin Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University
Workshops
Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Global Justice

Foreign Aid and the National Interest

Authors
Larry Diamond
News Type
Commentary
Date
Paragraphs

Since Saddam Hussein's fall from power last April, the world has learned a great deal about the consequences of his abhorrent rule: mass killings, a brutalized population, staggering corruption, an impoverished population, a devastated environment, neglected educational institutions, a miscarried justice system, and other failing governmental functions. This legacy of Saddam's horrific misrule is the most dramatic demonstration of the vital connection between the vibrancy and economic development of a people and the nature of their governing institutions. The mounting evidence of this linkage around the world must drive a revolution in the way that we administer foreign assistance.

All News button
1

Taiwan's China Policy and Cross-Strait Relations

-

This is a CDDRL's Special Event within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Dr. Chen-yuan Tung is vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, Republic of China (Taiwan) and associate professor at the Sun Yat-Sen Graduate Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, National Chengchi University (Taiwan). He received his Ph.D. in international affairs from the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His expertise focuses on economic relations between Taiwan and China, Chinese economic development, Taiwan-U.S.-China trilateral relations, and international economics.

Dr. Tung published book and book chapters including Challenges in the Era of Hu Jingtao (2002, in Chinese), The Globalization of the Chinese Economy (2002), Cross-Strait Economic Relations in the Era of Globalization (2003, in Chinese), Future China: Degenerative Totalitarianism (2004, in Chinese), Renminbi Exchange Rate: Economic and Strategic Analysis (2004, in Chinese), China Today (2005), and China as the World Factory (2006).

Philippines Conference Room

Chen-yuan Tung Vice Chairman Speaker Mainland Affairs Council, ROC (Taiwan)
Seminars
Subscribe to Economic Affairs