In recent years, a growing share of state and local budgetary resources has been diverted to a small number of firms through multi-billion-dollar location incentive megadeals, as represented by Amazon’s HQ2 search and Wisconsin’s Foxconn boondoggle. Structurally powerful companies have become adept at devising new mechanisms for extracting the public resources of local communities to secure a competition advantage over market rivals. But legal scholarship has not considered the...
This paper tests redistribution-based theories of democratization using data from stock markets. Consistent with these models, I show democratizations have a large, negative impact on asset valuations driven by a rise in redistribution risk. Across 90 countries over 200 years, risk premia are substantially elevated in democratizations, similar in magnitude to financial crises. Using a shift in Catholic church doctrine in support of democracy, I provide causal evidence that democratizations increase risk premia. Successful democratizations lead to substantial redistribution: the size of the public sector grows, income inequality falls, and the labor share of income rises. A model of asset prices and political regimes in which wealthy asset market participants face redistribution risk in democratizations can quantitatively explain these effects. The model also explains the negligible asset pricing response to autocratizations. Neither an increase in macroeconomic risk nor generic political risk can explain the results.... Read more about Max Miller (Alesina Seminar)
While Dataverse supports file uploads through its standard web interface, there are a variety of big data use cases where the Dataverse API and tools that use it can simplify the upload process. DVUploader, a Java command-line tool, and DVWebloader, a plug-in for Dataverse, are two tools that can handle larger files and larger numbers of files, upload files from a whole folder tree (retaining the folder paths in Dataverse), and/or only upload new files. In this...
Sooahn Shin, "Measuring Issue Specific Ideal Points from Roll Call Votes"
Abstract
Ideal points are widely used to measure the ideology and policy preferences of political actors, from voters and politicians to sovereign states. Yet, the lingering challenge is to measure ideal points specific to a single issue area. Scholars who wish to measure preferences in a specific area of interest often resort to subsetting the voting data, resulting in the loss of valuable information and rendering ambiguous comparisons across different issue areas. To...
At IQSS, we value our community, and our dedicated staff is at the heart of our community.
To recognize and celebrate employees, IQSS will hold our annual celebration of long-service employees. Staff who have reached a milestone of 10 years during the previous calendar year and incremental years of 5 thereafter will be honored. Therefore, to be eligible for a service award this year, employees would have reached their milestone anniversary of continuous service with IQSS (not Harvard) sometime in 2023.
Please join us for coffee and dessert to celebrate the following...
David Sutton, "Neighborhoods as Communities of Interest"
Abstract
Neighborhoods are the basic analytical level for many areas of social science. In particular, they serve as one form of communities of interest, a traditional redistricting criterion that lacks a formal definition. Recent research has attempted to define neighborhoods using the subjective definitions that people provide when asked to draw, define, or otherwise describe their neighborhoods. This research is highly informative about the connectedness of local areas but it is...
This workshop is offered every semester as a basic introduction to GIS. The topics covered are:
1. What is GIS, mapping, and spatial data. 2. GIS data types and file formats. 3. GIS analysis, problem solving, and case studies... Read more about Basic Intro to GIS
Hans Demetrio Gaebler (Dept of Statistics), "Overcoming Statistical Challenges in Detecting Discrimination"
Abstract
Outcome tests are a long-standing and widely used approach to detecting discrimination in lending, hiring, policing, and beyond. For example, if White loan recipients are found to default more often than racial minority recipients, the outcome test would suggest that lenders impose a double standard, preferentially lending to riskier White loan applicants. Despite its popularity, outcome tests have long been known to...