Brian Broughman
University of California, Berkeley
Law & Economics The role of independent directors has attracted considerable attention in light of recent corporate scandals. Independent directors are supposed to protect the interests of diffuse investors and protect the integrity of US markets. This interest in independent directors focuses on the governance of publicly traded firms. By contrast, in privately held firms investors are concentrated and are able to directly monitor management. According to the existing literature there is no role for independent directors in private firms. Yet, recent studies show that independent directors are very frequently used in private startup firms (Kaplan & Stromberg, 2003; Broughman & Fried, 2006). An alternative theory is needed to explain this practice. Using data from two recent studies of startup firms, I argue that independent directors use their position on the board to arbitrate disputes between entrepreneurs and investors.
Nicholas Buccola
University of Southern California
Political Science In this essay, I challenge the conventional criticisms of self-ownership by exploring the ways in which the idea was used by Frederick Douglass, the slave who became one of the most prominent American public intellectuals and statesmen of the nineteenth century. Douglass identified self-ownership as the "one idea" that animated his commitment to a variety of progressive causes including the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and religious liberty. This essay is a crucial part of a larger project in which I argue that Douglass was a civic liberal - a thinker who combined a fundamental liberal commitment to personal freedom with a fundamental communitarian commitment to social responsibility. I hope this essay will help us gain a better understanding of the moral foundations of liberalism and the possibility of forming a civic liberal synthesis.
Michael De Alessi
University of California, Berkeley
Environmental Policy My dissertation is focused on the economic, ecological and political effects of a radical change in fisheries management in New Zealand twenty years ago, along with some current political economic analysis of marine environmental policy in California. In 1986, New Zealand shifted from managing fisheries through input controls to a system of tradable quotas (quasi-property rights). My research evaluates how this change in ownership affected 1) the economics and organization of the fishing industry; 2) the health of target populations and the marine environment more generally; and 3) the political economy of marine reserve creation, with special emphasis on how New Zealand's efforts to create a network of marine reserves compares to California's.
Julia Gray
University of California, Los Angeles
Political Science In my dissertation, examining how financial institutions influence decisions of governments on exchange rate policies in the countries of Eastern Europe (EE), I employ a multi-method research design. Statistical analysis on a sample of twenty-five post-communist countries of EE over the period of 1990-2004 is accompanied by in-depth examination of three theoretically important cases-Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Poland-based on a thorough reading of the relevant secondary literature, the perusal of relevant government, company and bank documents, and the conducting of interviews. The thesis develops a novel three-fold typology of financial systems in EE-capture, collusion, and consensus exemplified by the three countries under a close examination. As a participant in the SURF program, I would want to expand one of my chapters into articles for publication. One chapter in need of great revision focuses on large-N empirical tests, using data on sovereign debt instruments from thirty-four emerging markets.
Joshua Hall
West Virginia University
Economics My current research interests like in the area of state and local public finance, with an emphasis on the efficiency of local school districts. My dissertation focuses on how the structure of local governments influences the quality and efficiency of local school districts. Ohio is one of the two states that allow school districts to choose among tax instruments. Ohio school districts can choose to raise revenue through a property tax, an income tax, or a combination of both. Yet only one-fifth of school districts choose to raise revenue using anything but the property tax. This creates a unique opportunity to study the effect of fiscal competition on tax base diversification.
Richard Hornbeck
Massachusetts Institute of Technoloty
Economics The goal of this project is to explore the nature of economic adjustments to permanent climate change. This paper will examine the potential for long-term adjustments to mitigate short-term costs, as revealed by farmers' responses to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Beyond comparing the relative magnitudes of short-term and long-term adjustments, this analysis will indicate the most important response channels, whether they be changes in variable production inputs, product choice, land investment, or migration. While previous estimates have focused on the costs of gradual climate change, this project will also reveal the dynamics of the economy's response to large-scale extreme environmental shocks.
Stan Markus
Harvard University
Government Property rights (PR) epitomize the rule of law in an economy, and are celebrated as the single most important factor in a country's fortune. The PR literature centers exclusively on the role of the state - the activities of firms contributing to economic legality present a consequential research gap. By investigating how firms defend their legal property rights against the state in Russia, Ukraine, and China, my dissertation will examine how to clear the metaphorical lawn, and how to defuse the 'mines'. I plan to devote the summer 2007 to drafting a chapter devoted to Ukraine. Overall, the conventional wisdom holds that only the state can secure PR. However, the developing world only rarely exhibits enlightened governments - the question of what the firms can do, if anything, acquires obvious urgency. Alas, PR scholarship treats the firms either as meek policy-takers or as rapacious business empires seeking 'to capture' the state. I introduce the firms' constructive role into theorizing the emergence of rule-based economic governance.
Monica Morrill
Cambridge University
Geography Historians are aware of the developmental impact of medicine as are pharmaceutical companies themselves. However for business and economic scholars this topic is undermined through their attempt to grapple with the sheer speed at which pharmaceutical innovation is moving forward globally, rather than pausing to understand the roots of its past. To this end, as a part of my thesis I intend to write a chapter that emphasizes the historical economics of the pharmaceutical industry of two key nations: the United Kingdom and Switzerland. And so it brings us back to the question of the globalization of pharmaceuticals. Why some markets are stronger than others, even with a similar GDP per capita, and how the demand for pharmaceuticals is having a changing effect on the nature of health care. One of my primary concerns is that largely to do with strict government regulation; a significant part of the pharmaceutical industry is not consumer-driven. To what extent does policy influence pharmaceutical development? How does this impact challenges to innovation? I wish to explore these further vis-à-vis historical examples to possibly know how and where this development began.
Brandon Turner
University of Wisconsin
Political Science John Stuart Mill's most quotable line-"he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that"- is, in its original context, a justification for the policies of tolerance and freedom of opinion laid out in the first few chapters of On Liberty. Even if your belief is the right one, Mill suggests, you still have to know why it is right; or, put another way, one must know why everyone else is wrong. Having formidable opponents to our own ideas is so important, writes Mill, that we must "imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil's advocate can conjure up." What my project hopes to do is borrow this theory of moral antagonism developed in On Liberty and apply it to Mill's writings on governance, specifically his Considerations on Representative Government. I want to argue that what Mill calls "the function of Antagonism" is the moral antagonism described above as it plays out in political institutions. I want to develop the theory of political antagonism Mill hints at in Representative Government and elsewhere, and I want to explore the ways this design may improve our understanding of political deliberation and decision-making. ...The upshot, of course, is that Mill's antagonistic principles may help us design deliberative institutions capable of providing the experience of politics best-suited to free individuals.
Edwin Van de Haar
Maastricht University
International Political Theory My thesis focuses on the international relations of David Hume, Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, respectively. The international relations of these four prominent classical liberals will be analyzed within the framework of the English School, most prominently represented by Martin Wight and Hedley Bull. In this chapter, a distinct classical liberal approach to international relations will be outlined, which differs from the (American style) liberalism most commonly seen in international relations theory, and also from the libertarian approach which is mostly absent from international relations debates. For example, my research indicates that classical liberals are less optimistic about the possibilities for worldwide supranational institution building, when compared to many current liberals, who are mostly inspired by Kant and Rawls. Also, classical liberals tend to find it utopian to expect that war can be abolished, which is still a fashionable view among libertarians. Classical liberals contend that people have to deal with international conflict, and base that idea on their view of human nature. By contrast, many thinkers in the modern liberal tradition just seem to 'wish war away' in their writings. This does not entail that classical liberals believe in a 'realist' or Hobbesian world order; they hold a far more sophisticated view, based on the traditions of just war and international society, among others inspired by Grotius and the natural law thinkers.
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