PEOPLE | 2007-2008 Fellows

Dissertation Fellows

Ryan Bubb
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University

My dissertation research explores the reciprocal relationships among legal institutions, political institutions, human development and economic outcomes in the developing world. I use the tools of microeconomic analysis to model the origin and significance of legal and political institutions. I hope to credibly estimate the impact of specific institutions and as well as to test theories about how institutions arise and evolve. Much of the foundational empirical work on institutions and development has relied on cross- country institutional variation, often using instrumental variables based on geography or historical factors to measure the economic effects of institutions. In contrast, my empirical work focuses on within-country variation in institutions and economic outcomes and examines both directions of causation.

In one ongoing project, I am implementing a randomized field experiment in India in collaboration with ICICI Bank to exogenously vary contracting institutions and measure the causal effect of providing farmers a way to credibly commit to making payments in the future. One of the difficulties in measuring the causal effect of contracting institutions is in identifying plausibly exogenous institutional variation. This will be, to my knowledge, the first randomized field experiment that exogenously varies contracting institutions and will contribute to the growing literature linking legal institutions to economic outcomes. Furthermore, our experimental interventions and surveys will allow us to test several hypotheses about the underlying causes of contracting failures.

Magnus Feldmann
Ph.D. Candidate, Government Department, Harvard University

My research focuses on economic institutions in post-communist countries, including the distributive effects of these institutions and the determinants of institutional origins. There is great variation in economic institutions across post-communist countries, and many scholars have recently begun to take a greater interest in the role of institutional reforms during transition. My dissertation argues that more careful analysis of this diversity can provide a better understanding of the transition process and its effects on people's welfare. In my dissertation I focus on the variation in labour market institutions in Central and Eastern Europe , and a recent paper on this topic was published in Comparative Political Studies . My research combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, and I have conducted research in a range of countries in the region, notably the Baltic States , Poland , Russia and Slovenia .

Joseph Mazor
Ph.D. Candidate, Government Department, Harvard University

I am currently writing my dissertation on property rights in natural resources. Natural resources are not created by anyone and so thinking about how natural resource property rights ought to be structured involves considering a unique set of issues. I argue for a much more egalitarian distribution of raw natural resource wealth compared with the status quo, not only within a particular country, but also globally. Given the magnitude of wealth involved, such an egalitarian distribution would have a profound impact on people's life prospects.

Thinking through the issue of property rights in natural resources involves considering two fundamental questions. The first is how to distribute raw natural resources. I argue that raw natural resource wealth ought to be divided equally in the most efficient way possible and that the distribution of raw natural resource wealth ought to remain equal over time. The second question is what entitlements are due to those who add value to natural resources. I argue that people ought to be allowed to keep the fruits of their labor (i.e. the value they add to natural resources.) The scheme that best implements both of these principles, I contend, involves auctioning off natural resources and then taxing them at a rate equal to their annual unimproved (i.e. raw) value. The proceeds of the auction and taxes should be distributed equally to every member of society.

Of course, there are many difficulties with implementing this idea. How can we measure and separate the "unimproved value" of a resource from the added value created by people? How will the redistribution of raw natural resource wealth affect people's incentives to engage in activities related to natural resources such as labor, speculation, and discovery? Can and should raw resource wealth be distributed equally globally? How ought we implement a change in the current system given the expectations of current natural resource owners? I explore all of these questions in my dissertation drawing on ideas from Henry George and contemporary left-libertarians.

In addition to property right in natural resources, my other research interests include distributive justice, the philosophy of economics, and democratic theory (and in particular, deliberative democracy.)

Elizabeth More
Ph.D. Candidate, History Department, Harvard University

In my dissertation, "Social Scientists, Public Policy, and the Revaluing of Working Mothers, 1940-2000," I examine the intellectual and political history of working mothers in the United States . In the decades following World War II, advocates for working women and like-minded social scientists articulated new defenses of maternal employment, even as many others in politics, the social sciences, and popular culture celebrated women's roles as homemakers. My dissertation asks several overarching questions: What arguments were made in favor of working mothers, and by whom? What intellectual forces shaped these debates, and how? How were these arguments used in the development of public policies including welfare reform, child care, pregnancy discrimination, and family leave?

Defenses of working mothers have long been associated with the rights-based philosophy that emerged during feminism's first wave and that was forcefully rearticulated during the feminist resurgence in the 1960s and ‘70s. However, a positive vision of women's work was not always associated with individualism and individual rights, nor has maternal employment always been considered dangerous to children, marriages, and society. I will explore a powerful new argument in support of working mothers: the assertion that maternal employment actually benefited society, rather than harmed it. Advocates for working women—social scientists, writers, activists, and lobbyists—began to develop and articulate this idea in the postwar period. They argued that working mothers provided a socially beneficial public good . These new arguments were not based on theories of individual rights. Rather, they took the good of children, families, workplaces, and society, as well as of the women themselves, as their fundamental justifications. These issues played an important role in policy formation. Discussions of child care, welfare reform, pregnancy discrimination, and family leave brought the question of whether maternal employment was healthy for society to the center of national political debates.

By studying the intellectual and political history of working mothers, I hope to contribute to historians' understanding of several related issues. The first is the tension between individualism and family relationships that characterized debates about women's rights and roles throughout the twentieth century. The second is the debate within feminism over whether equal rights or legal protections would better serve women. Finally, my dissertation will also contribute to the history of feminism. By paying attention to the politics of working mothers, I will complicate the longstanding division of second-wave feminists into liberal and radical camps and explore how bourgeois and working-class feminists converged and diverged in their intellectual and political approaches to work and family.

Dina Pomeranz
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University

My primary fields of interest are development economics and public economics, with a particular focus on taxation. Current research projects include two randomized interventions in Chile: an analysis of factors affecting evasion of the value added tax by small and medium enterprises, as well as an evaluation of determinants and impacts of savings schemes for low-income microcredit clients.

Hengameh Saberi
S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School

My dissertation traces the intellectual history of the tradition of international law in the United States . My hypothesis is three-fold: (1) there is a discernable continuity in American international legal thought since the end of the nineteenth century to this date (hence, being a tradition vis-à-vis others); (2) this tradition could be best understood in light of a peculiar relationship between philosophical pragmatism and American exceptionalism (both are plagued by a vernacular adaptation and as such robbed of explanatory value in the existing literature); and (3) contrary to the commonly held view of American international legal thinking as problem-solving, anti-formal, pragmatic and creative, in both the real world and the discipline's literature, I posit that it is plagued by a simultaneous sense of inflationary hope and deflationary despair rooted in (ideological) foundationalism, and therefore, at its best, has served as a vindication of the status quo. My overall project is an attempt to understand this last hypothesis (symptom) in light of the one that comes before.

As a cardinal part of the thesis, I am currently working on the intellectual heritage on the one hand, and legacy on the other, of the policy-oriented approach of the New Haven School of international law. The configurative jurisprudence of Harold Lasswell and Myers McDougal, known as the emblematic pillar of "the way Americans think about international law", ironically replaced one type of formalism with another with enduring consequences for generations to come. Despite methodological heterogeneity in American international law scholarship today, as seen nowhere else and in no other time, the distance between international law and a tool of justice is as far away as it has always been, if not further. I hope to propose that the "spirit" of philosophical pragmatism offers a solution.

Navad Shoked Nadav Shoked
S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School

In my dissertation I examine different elements of 20 th century American property and local government laws, concluding that they are pervaded by the populist conception of property. This conception entails a normative idea, as old as the republic itself ("Jeffersonianism"), according to which Americans' individual wellbeing, as well as the persistence of democracy, depends on a wide distribution of small landholdings. I illustrate how key legal and political aspects of the American physical and socio-economic landscape—such as zoning and homeowners' associations—are justified by this ideal, and in turn, how they reinterpret it. I will further shed light on the stated and unstated benefits and costs associated with these varied policies, thereby presenting not only the promise—in terms of social justice, equality and liberty—of the populist conception of property, but also its darker sides.

Zoe Trodd
Ph.D. Candidate, History of American Civilization Department, Harvard University

I am completing a dissertation on social movements and protest literature. Titled "Never the New World : American Protest, the Politics of Form, and the Reusable Past of Abolitionism," my dissertation argues that American protest writers have remade their country with the tools of earlier protest movements. Their protest literature has at its heart a folk process ; old tunes with new words in new circumstances. Emphasizing an American tradition of patriotic protest, writers have tried to d ebunk the myth of American history and literature as a series of fresh starts—of America as a perpetual New World . And, with its chosen and reshaped ancestry, protest literature has challenged the particularly pervasive idea that Leftist writing is without memory, never putting down roots in American soil. My dissertation reveals the palpable pasts of protest texts. Organized around six protest movements and their literature, it attempts to expand our understanding of protest legacies, and of the role of historical memory in protest writing.

The overarching narrative that connects all six chapters is this literature's shared revision of a 19th-century abolitionist aesthetic. The dissertation shows how six movements—women's rights, labor and socialism, anti-lynching, civil rights, black power, and modern anti-slavery—all drew upon the aesthetic memory of abolitionism. In awakening the abolitionists between 1865 and 2007, protest writers refashioned the history of abolitionism to suit their own protest moments. Scholars have traced the influence of Revolutionary-era protest, but no one has yet explored abolitionist writing as an antecedent and model for modern American protest—in spite of abolitionism's status as arguably the most important and revolutionary reform movement in America's past. My dissertation identifies an abolitionist politics of form and traces the reconstructions and revisions of that form across protest texts; including pamphlets, manifestos, speeches, letters, novels, short stories, poetry, drama, photographs, paintings, sculptures, films, oral histories, autobiographies, and songs. The politics of memory and the reusable past of abolitionism emerge in American protest literature as tightly bound to the politics of form.

Daniel Wood
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University

My research focuses on manipulative messages, namely situations in which the sender of a message expects the receiver to act upon that message to the sender's advantage and receiver's detriment. One obvious reason that manipulative messages succeed is that message recipients do not have infinite inductive abilities, which is the usual assumption in game theory. My research explores the implications of various sorts of bounded rationality that would explain why manipulative messages are successful, including the consequences for experimental work about them. While I am primarily interested in using experiments for empirical work on manipulative messages, I also intend to use the content of spam emails as a source of near limitless "real world" examples of successful manipulative messages.

I am also pursuing a secondary interest in the contrast between consequentialist and deontological preferences. How does the domain of ethical preferences affect how agents would try to realize them? Some of my previous research with Michael Kremer has focused on comparing charitable impulses towards particular individuals with more universal charitable tendencies. We examine in which situations one form results in higher levels of realized charity and social welfare. This comparison is of different consequentialist preferences, and I am widening the set of preferences compared to include those with more rule-like goals, such as tithing.

Research Fellows

Mihai Manea
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University

Research Interests: Efficiency, equity, and incentive properties of matching mechanisms; game theory.

Benjamin Waterhouse
Ph.D. Candidate, History Department, Harvard University

The business of America has always been business, but in the last quarter of the twentieth century, corporate leaders and business associations came to play a larger role in everyday American politics than they ever had in the past. For thirty years, scholars have analyzed the unprecedented rise in business political lobbying during the 1970s, emphasizing the increase in corporate PACs and greater sophistication of the business "voice" in lawmaking. My dissertation seeks to connect this mobilization with broader issues of economic policy and national political culture through an analysis of major business associations and their pursuit of what I call a "pro-business agenda." Specifically, I argue that, amid the economic chaos of the 1970s, leaders of major firms and national business associations mobilized politically in unprecedented ways and launched a two-pronged campaign that targeted both national economic policies and popular opinion of those policies. In the process, they profoundly shaped national discourse on the proper role of government in society.

Arguing for a new understanding of American politics in the late twentieth century, this project charts, roughly chronologically, the successes and failures of the pro-business agenda. Chapter One traces the rise of business mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s, analyzing "economic education" programs business leaders created to promote the virtues of free enterprise. Chapter Two addresses inflation and business leaders' opposition to wage-price control programs under Presidents Nixon and Carter, as well as their campaign to discredit Keynesian economics more broadly. Chapter Three uses the battle over a Consumer Protection Agency as a window into the complicated—and partly successful—struggle against government regulation of business. Chapter Four assesses the influence of the pro-business agenda on national politics by analyzing the crucial election of 1980, devoting attention to under-studied also-ran candidates John Anderson, John Connally, and Edward Kennedy. Finally, Chapter Five explores the fissures between the pro-business agenda and the ascendant Republican Right through an analysis of the politics of taxes and budget deficits in the early 1980s.

Matthew Weinzierl
Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, Harvard University

Taxation is society's fundamental economic policy tool, and its analysis has always been a primary focus of economists, sociologists, and philosophers. Recent economic research on taxation centers on the Mirrlees (1971) model of so-called "optimal taxation". I am currently working on three projects under the umbrella of optimal taxation.

First, while recent analysis has identified sophisticated ways in which taxation might be designed to maximize a particular measure of societal well-being, these recommendations require complicated reforms of the status quo and, therefore, are often criticized as unrealistic. An alternative is incremental, partial reform. My first project examines one particular partial reform: allowing income taxes to depend on individuals' ages. This reform addresses a fundamental mismatch between the standard theory of optimal taxation, which is static, and the dynamic nature of individual earnings over the lifecycle. Moreover, it would be relatively simple to tailor taxes to age, making this a promising example of partial reform.

A second project addresses a fundamental question about the leading theory of taxation, which implies that any fixed personal attribute correlated with the ability to earn income should be taxed. Height is such an attribute. My coauthor, Greg Mankiw, and I replicate existing evidence showing that height is correlated with income and use it to derive the "optimal height tax" for white males in the United States . We find that the optimal tax would take (on average) approximately seven percent of a tall man's incomes and transfer it to shorter men. While these results follow directly from standard theory and empirical evidence, most people find the idea of a height tax unconventional or even absurd. Why do most people have an intuitive resistance to a height tax? Does that resistance undermine our faith in the standard model of taxation?

Finally, I am working on the effect of preference heterogeneity on optimal taxation. Debates over taxation have historically included the argument that individuals who choose to work in order to consume goods should not be taxed at higher rates than those who choose not to work in order to consume leisure, since time is a resource for society just as are the ingredients of goods. This argument has gone virtually unexamined by economists. I show that preference heterogeneity has substantial normative and positive implications for the analysis of tax policy and that the empirical variation in tax policies across countries is consistent with these implications.