Publications

WCFIA Publications

The Weatherhead Center has developed a presence on the Internet that, to a growing readership, is playing a significant role in the projection of Harvard scholarship on international affairs. The site includes: faculty research available through categorical fields of inquiry; searches by author, subject, title or date of publication; Working Papers selected for online distribution based on their relevance to contemporary issues in international affairs; In the News links to op-ed and other pieces written by or about the Center’s faculty associates; and recent books by faculty associates, including editorial summaries. The Center is always adding to the collection of published journal articles available on its site and responding to the interests of Center faculty and other users in making the site an indispensable scholarly tool.

Below are a selection of our most recently uploaded publications.


Obama Should Test Iran’s Nuclear Offer
by Allison, Graham T., Jr.
Publisher: The Washington Post
Publication Type: Op-ed
President Obama should take a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook in winning the final inning of the Cold War. Obama can challenge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to put his enriched uranium where...
Published Date: October 2011 More
What If 9/11 Had Never Happened?
by Ferguson, Niall
Publisher: The Daily Beast
Publication Type: Op-ed
How different would the world be today if there had been no 9/11? What if the attacks had been foiled or bungled? One obvious answer is that Americans would probably care a lot less than they do...
Published Date: September 2011 More
Texting Makes U Stupid
by Ferguson, Niall
Publisher: The Daily Beast
Publication Type: Op-ed
The good news is that today’s teenagers are avid readers and prolific writers. The bad news is that what they are reading and writing are text messages. According to a survey carried out last...
Published Date: September 2011 More
You Were Expecting Statehood?
by Ferguson, Niall
Publisher: The Daily Beast
Publication Type: Op-ed
The Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s bid for full U.N. membership was dead on arrival in New York. So why bother even raising the subject? The answer: to drum up international sympathy for the...
Published Date: September 2011 More
The Geniuses We'll Never Know
by Ferguson, Niall
Publisher: The Daily Beast
Publication Type: Op-ed
This essay is not about Steve Jobs. It is about the countless individuals with roughly the same combination of talents of whom we’ve never heard and never will. Most of the 106 billion people...
Published Date: October 2011 More
Blame the Baby Boomers
by Ferguson, Niall
Publisher: The Daily Beast
Publication Type: Op-ed
After years when young Americans yearned only to be occupied on Wall Street, suddenly they have taken to occupying it. It’s easy to scoff at this phenomenon. I know, because I have. This is...
Published Date: October 2011 More
Yes, Wall Street Helps the Poor
by Ferguson, Niall
Publisher: The Daily Beast
Publication Type: Op-ed
It was a scene to curdle liberal blood. A ballroom full of New York hedge-fund managers playing poker…to raise money for charter schools. That’s where I found myself last Wednesday: at a Texas...
Published Date: October 2011 More
The Coming Crises of Governments
by Barro, Robert J.
Publisher: Financial Times
Publication Type: Op-ed
The global crises of financial and housing markets are now being superseded by new crises of governments. The fiscal challenges for the weaker members of the eurozone are early warnings, as are...
Published Date: August 2011 More
How to Get That AAA Rating Back
by Barro, Robert J.
Publisher: The Wall Street Journal
Publication Type: Op-ed
Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama have at least one similarity. They both were confronted by great economic challenges when they became president. Mr. Reagan's immediate challenge was that inflation...
Published Date: August 2011 More
Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics
by Barro, Robert J.
Publisher: The Wall Street Journal
Publication Type: Op-ed
Keynesian economics—the go-to theory for those who like government at the controls of the economy—is in the forefront of the ongoing debate on fiscal-stimulus packages.
Published Date: August 2011 More
How to Really Save the Economy
by Barro, Robert J.
Publisher: The New York Times
Publication Type: Op-ed
The United States is in the third year of a grand experiment by the Obama administration to revive the economy through enormous borrowing and spending by the government, with the Federal Reserve...
Published Date: September 2011 More
America as Argentina
by Chinn, Menzie D.; Frieden, Jeffry
Publisher: Harvard Magazine
Publication Type: Magazine Article
It has been a rotten economic decade for the United States. Why—and can anything be done to keep the stagnant new normal from persisting? In Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and...
Published Date: November 2011 More
Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery
by Chinn, Menzie D.; Frieden, Jeffry
Two acclaimed political economists explore the origins and long-term effects of the financial crisis in historical and comparative perspective. Welcome to Argentina: by 2008 the United States had...
Publication Type: Book
Published Date: September 2011 More

Offshoring and the Role of Trade Agreements
by Antràs, Pol
The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention?...
Publication Type: Published Paper
Published Date: September 2011 More
Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits
by Alt, James
We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant,...
Publication Type: Published Paper
Published Date: January 2011 More