Political Economy Commons^™

The Belgian Credit Guarantee Scheme (Belgium Gfc), Aidan Lawson

Journal of Financial Crises

Much like other developed economies during the global financial crisis, Belgium faced substantial systemic stress to its large and heavily concentrated financial system. To combat these mounting pressures, the Belgian government launched a wide-ranging, opt-in state debt guarantee program in a concerted effort to instill confidence and stymie the fear of runs in its financial sector. The debt guarantee scheme, pursuant to which eligible institutions could issue government-guaranteed debt, was originally put into place on October 15, 2008, and retroactively covered liabilities entered into from October 9, 2008, to October 31, 2009, with a maximum maturity of three years. It …

The European Central Bank's Three-Year Long-Term Refinancing Operations (Ecb Gfc), Aidan Lawson

Journal of Financial Crises

The announcement of the three-year Long-Term Refinancing Operations (LTROs) by the European Central Bank (ECB) on December 8, 2011, signaled the beginning of the largest ECB market liquidity programs to date. Continued and increasing liquidity-related pressures in the form of ballooning financial market credit default swap (CDS) spreads, Euro-area volatility, and interbank lending rates prompted a much more forceful ECB response than what had been done previously. The LTROs, using a repurchase (repo) agreement auction mechanism, allowed any Eurozone financial institution to tap essentially unlimited funding at a fixed rate of just 1%. Because the three-year LTROs were so similar …

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (Talf) (U.S. Gfc), June Rhee

Journal of Financial Crises

In the fall of 2008, the securitization market, which was the major provider of credit for consumers and small businesses, came to a near halt. Investors in this market abandoned not only the residential mortgage-backed securities that triggered the financial crisis but also consumer and business asset-backed securities (ABS), which had a long track record of strong performance, and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). Also, the unprecedented widening of spreads for these securities rendered new issuance uneconomical, and the shutdown of the securitization market threatened to exacerbate the downturn in the economy.

On November 25, 2008, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) …

Market Liquidity Programs: Gfc And Before, June Rhee, Greg Feldberg, Ariel Smith, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

The virulence of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC) was explained in large part by the increased reliance of the global financial system on market-based funding and the lack of preexisting tools to address a disruption in that type of system. This paper surveys market liquidity programs (MLPs), which we define as government interventions in which the key motivation is to stabilize liquidity in a specific wholesale funding market that is under stress. Most of the MLPs surveyed in this paper were launched during and after the GFC, but two pre-GFC MLPs are included. A subsequent survey on MLPs …

The Effects Of Economic And Political Globalization On Level Of Democracy, Julianna R. Pestretto

Student Publications

Since the birth of the nation state, we have been undergoing a process called globalization. Simply put, globalization is the process of interaction and integration among the people, companies and governments of different nations. It is a process driven by trade and investment and supported by economic partnerships and institutions. As time goes on, the effects of globalization have become more intense, and are felt disproportionately across nations and socio-economic levels, resulting in a backlash that has been largely characterized by the rise of right-wing populism. It is thus important to study the effects that globalization has on level of …

Greening Inequality: How Urban Sustainable Development Fails Under Neoliberalism, Josie R. Allison

University Honors Theses

Despite its banner of common-good altruism, urban sustainable development becomes a branding scheme for municipalities when it operates under and prioritizes a neoliberal agenda. Neoliberalism is the dominant economic philosophy within the United States, and other western economies, that emphasizes extreme economic liberalism and open markets with public fiscal austerity and the diminished role of governments. This has transferred a great portion of power and funding once held by the public sector into the hands of the private sector. Under neoliberalism, city governments function with stripped federal funding and limited budgets, while leaning on private companies for public operations, like …

Friedrich Hayek On Monetary And Banking Systems Reforms, Adrian Ravier

Journal of New Finance

Throughout his life, Friedrich Hayek worked towards prescribing a monetary policy under which the world economy would again enjoy the stability it had known under the classical international gold standard system. This paper presents three banking and monetary systems that were pivotal in the history of banking and closely scrutinized by Hayek. The paper outlines those systems, summarizes Hayek’s comments on each and then discusses the recent literature on the subject in the light of Hayek’s influence.

Institutions, Structural Policies, And Economic Development: Evaluating The Interrelationships Between Rule Spaces For Developing Countries, Jordan Pattison

Student Summer Scholars Manuscripts

Research on long term economic development has consolidated around the central role of economic and political institutions. Within these institutional spaces, structural policies represent a subset of incentive structures with their own effects on economic behavior. To capture the separate effects of both institutional environments and structural policies, we construct an Institutional Index (II) and a Structural Policy Index (SPI) to evaluate their effects on income levels and short term growth rates for non-high-income states. This paper finds that both the II and SPI predict variations in income levels between non-high-income states, with the II producing a larger and more …

Swinging Shale: Shale Oil, Global Oil Market, And The Geopolitics Of Oil, Inwook Kim

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Is shale oil “revolutionizing” the global oil market and the geopolitics of oil? If so, how? While two aspects of the shale boom—a new source of supply and a cause for the price collapse in 2014–2015—dominate the conventional wisdom, I argue that the most revolutionary change is the least understood aspect of shale oil—shale oil producers’ rise as new swing suppliers due to its unique extraction technique and cost structure. Shale oil producers also differ from traditional swing producers in motives, contexts, and an amount of accessible excess capacity such that while shale oil lowers the medium-term price ceiling, it …

Role Of The Botoh As Political Brokers And Gamblers During The Tulungagung Local Election Of 2018, Mohammad Darry Abiyyu

Jurnal Politik

Current studies on the botoh generally focus on gambling in village-head elections (pilkades) and how its role transforms from pilkades to local elections (pilkada). However, this article defines the botoh as a political broker and gambler during the 2018 local election of Tulungagung Regency. This research found that the botoh’s way of persuading voters had a positive effect on an unfavorable candidate and helped him win. This study conducted in-depth interviews of “big” botoh, observed field operation patterns, and collected documents from related parties. The practice of gambling during pilkada is categorized into three types: ngapit, leg-leg’an, and biting. This …

A Defense And Expansion Of The Theory Of Capitalist Ground Rent: Speculation, Securitization, And Struggles Over Land And Housing, Francesca Manning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why are the rents so high? Who is responsible for homelessness, for urban and rural displacement? How can these problems be combatted?

Recent literature addressing these questions has pointed to gentrification and the financialization of land and housing, faulted financialized landlords, hedge funds, and the irredeemable logic of finance, and pointed to the importance of land and housing regulation to prevent displacement.

However, theories of displacement—in both land and housing, on both urban and rural terrain—suffer from a lack of an underlying theory of the logic, tendencies, and limits of ground rent extraction in capitalism.

This dissertation develops a theory …

Economic And Strategic Significance Of Development Performance Of Special Economic Zones From The Perspective Of Maritime Industry, Yuemun Chan

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Chinese Investments On The Kenyan Economy, Candice Newcomb

International Studies (MA) Theses

The involvement of China in Kenya has been increasing in recent years. China’s investments in Kenya are still impacting the Kenyan economy significantly. This thesis will examine the positive and negative impacts that the Chinese investments have had on the Kenyan economy.

This thesis will also address the role that the Kenyan government plays in the facilitating of the Chinese investments. It will highlight the importance the Kenyan government has in prioritizing policies such as labor laws for the Kenyan people. The Kenyan government has a responsibility to protect its citizens from the negative impacts of Chinese investments such as …

"At The Very Beginning, There's This Dream." The Role Of Utopia In The Workings Of Local And Cryptocurrencies, Diane-Laure Arjalies

Business Publications

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the number of alternative currencies aiming at transforming global financial institutions, such as local and complementary currencies (LCC) and cryptocurrencies, has exploded. Yet the motivations and workings of such monies are relatively unknown. This chapter aims to fill this gap by providing a framework that uncovers the ideals pursued by alternative currencies, and the effects of those ideals on the production of money. To do so, I present a comparative analysis of the valuation infrastructure – the processes through which value(s) is produced – of one LCC, Sol Violette, and three cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ğ1 …

The Data City, The Idiom And Questions Of Locality, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the “smart city” as a techno-ideological apparatus,that through data analysis and algorithmic forms of governmentality tends to colonize space and time, and an attempt to reframe the very concept of intelligence within the smart cities. Two concepts are presented as tools for such a reframing: locality and idiom, where the first is conceived as openness of meaning generated by a territory, while the latter,analysed througha paradigmatic Irish example (Friel’s play Translations), prepares the ground for the pars construensof the paper. The claim, built by intertwining a set of authors (Ricoeur, …

Faith-Based Paths To Business Success: Malaysian Manifestations Of The Evangelical-Neoliberal Nexus, Králik Martin

Student Works (2020-2029)

The thesis profiles a number of evangelical Christian groups which operate in Malaysia’s Klang Valley. Some of them have embraced business, financing, investment and real estate undertakings on a significant scale. The objective was to cast new light on how the confluence of evangelical and neoliberal capitalist forces (occurring first in the United States and now transnationally) influenced and at times directly shaped their setting up, development and growth, as well as broader socioeconomic and political positions. In particular, the aim was to map out and analyse the founders’ and members’ choice of religious affiliation; their personal motivations and the …

Professor Mike Seeborg On Covid-19 Jobless Benefits, Eric Stock

Interviews for WGLT

IWU Professor of Economics Mike Seeborg said Congress should extend COVID-19 jobless benefits past July of 2020, but should also develop a plan to phase them out once jobless rates fall below 10%. Eric Stock from WGLT spoke to Seeborg about ecconomic issues related to Covid-19.

Economies Of Security: Foucault And The Genealogy Of Neoliberal Reason, Marshall Scheider

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

Michel Foucault is well-known for his theorizations of institutional power, normativity, and biopolitics. Less well-known is the fact that Foucault developed his analysis of biopolitics in and through his historical investigation of neoliberalism. Today, while critique of neoliberalism has become a commonplace of humanities discourse, and popular resistance to neoliberalization rocks the southern hemisphere, it remains unclear that the historical specificity of neoliberalism is well-understood. In particular, the relation between classical liberalism and neoliberal governance remains murky in popular debate. As Foucault powerfully illustrates, this relation is far from clear-cut, and neoliberalism is not reducible to a simple extension of …

“The Speechmaking Of A Girl-Orator”: Reason, Gender, And Authority In Dorothy Hunter’S Free Trade Oratory, Erinn Elizabeth Campbell

Honors Projects

Dorothy M. Hunter (1881-1977) rose to prominence during the 1906 United Kingdom general election as a markedly “girlish” yet widely respected free trade orator. While men on the Edwardian public political platform typically built a reputation for oratorical prowess through theatrical displays of “heroic” masculinity, Hunter established her authority as a speaker through two very different (and apparently contradictory) strategies. Her performance of “charming” middle-class femininity helped demonstrate her right to speak on free trade as a “women’s question,” extending women’s traditional authority over matters of domestic consumption to include questions of political economy. Trusting in the power of education …

Contemporary High-Skilled Mexican Immigrant Entrepreneurs In Texas, Elizabeth Salamanca, Jorge Alcaraz

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

The number of Mexican entrepreneurs relocating to the United States has significantly increased during the last decade and their profile, as well as that of their businesses, have changed. This study develops a typology of Mexican migrant entrepreneurs living in the U.S., particularly in Texas, and of the business ventures that they undertake, and it determines the association between the entrepreneurs' profile and the kind of businesses they create. Through the analysis of migrant entrepreneurs' profiles, this paper identifies in what kind of transnational activities these entrepreneurs participate. The research follows both a qualitative approach based on the Gioia methodology …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Building For Culture: How Municipal Ownership Of Cultural Facilities Influences Annual Arts Funding In American Cities, Adam M. Sachs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how local government support for arts and culture varies across 24 American cities. It has proven to be challenging for researchers to accurately measure municipal arts support. Research on cultural policy has also often focused on the federal level, despite total city expenditures far exceeding national or state government support. This thesis attempts to take an accurate pulse of city expenditures in 2017 and correlates those spending levels to the variation in city ownership of arts facilities. Rooted in the historical perspectives of the ‘new institutionalism’ and path-dependency, this paper argues that past decisions about taking ownership …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Reclaiming Indiana: The Politics Of Crisis Amid The Failures Of Liberal Capitalist Modernity, Chris Grove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnography examines grassroots political responses to the economic crisis that began in 2008, foremost in the US Midwest, which arguably laid the groundwork both for the election of President Donald Trump and presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders. President Obama launched his $787 billion stimulus plan in Elkhart, Indiana, in early 2009. At the height of the crisis, unemployment skyrocketed from four to 20 percent in Elkhart, and it became central to struggles over the political direction of the US. With few safety nets, Elkhart residents struggled to meet their basic needs, creating conditions for political organizing on both …

Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Empirical results find different conclusions than theoretical evidence of how electorates perceive road work. This paper uses a geographically smaller unit of analysis than prior work, political alignment, local election cycles, and difference-in-differences. It finds political distortions in invasive road maintenance timing and rules out maintenance seasonality. Spatial discontinuity plots leveraging ward boundary cutoffs confirm the shift. Results identify new public distortions to road maintenance, local election cycles, which are widespread and frequent. The estimates are used to calculate financial costs of local elections on road maintenance. Local elections have cost medium-large U.S. cities over $185.5 million from 1960- 2020.

Projects Of Economic And Social Development In The Global South: The 20th And 21st-Century Developmental Trends And Their Impacts, Malachi Okechi Chukwu

2020 Symposium Posters

In the 1950’s Western countries promised to promote economic development in the underdeveloped world. However, the Global South remains behind, trapped in abject poverty. Eurocentric literature produced by mainstream scholars of economic growth in the past seven decades has continually promoted Structural Adjustment Programs and Millennium Development Goals designed to improve the Global South. Tragically, each of the West’s prescribed economic models failed at the expense of people of the Global South. The failure of Western promised growth led to an opportunity for China to offer an alternative model. Additionally, the long-term effects of the prescribed models of development have …

Sanctuary Cities And Their Respective Effect On Crime Rates, Adam R. Schutt

Undergraduate Economic Review

According to the U.S. Center for Immigration Studies (2017), cities or counties in twenty-four states declare themselves as a place of “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. This study addresses the following question: Do sanctuary cities experience higher crime rates than those cities that are not? Using publicly available data, this regression analysis investigates the relationship between crime rates in selected cities and independent variables which the research literature or the media has linked to criminal activity. Results of this research reveal that sanctuary cities do not experience higher violent or property crime rates than those cities that are not sanctuary cities.

Assessing The Determinants Of The Human Development Index In Oil-Dependent Nations, Adrian Fossaceca

Undergraduate Economic Review

Numerous rentier states from around the world derive all or a fundamental portion of their national revenues from the rent of natural resources. These revenues are essential for the policy-making strategies pertaining to social welfare programs and for the funding of development projects within the country. In order to determine the effectiveness of rentier states in terms of development promotion, this paper will utilize the Human Development Index (HDI) as a proxy variable for development levels. Regression analysis indicates that a substantial proportion of the variation of the Human Development Index in oil-dependent economies can be explained by the adolescent …

Co-Predatory Rule: International Cooperation With Respect To Cryptocurrency Taxation In Russia And Belarus, Jim Mignano

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

This article presents an example of how globalization and digitization force states to rely on international organization. Examining tax policy with respect to cryptocurrency—an innovative, global technology—the implication is that a state levying taxes on cryptocurrency must turn to international monitoring and enforcement regimes to support effective taxation. Based on Margaret Levi’s theory of predatory rule, I submit a theory of “co-predation” to explain international cooperation with respect to taxation of novel, cross-border technologies such as cryptocurrency. The Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI), an anti-tax evasion framework promulgated by the OECD, serves as an example of international cooperation. A comparison …

The Risk Of Monetary Integration: How Italy And Germany’S Cultural And Economic Differences Are Incompatible With Shared Monetary Policy And Jeopardize The Stability Of The Union, Matthew Rossi Jordan

Senior Theses

The project of the European Union has successfully transformed western Europe into a powerful and stable bloc empowered by expansive economic and political integration. However, certain pathways of integration, such as the introduction of the Eurozone and the monetary consolidation it entails, have actually weakened the Union by disregarding the vast economic and cultural differences between the countries. In this thesis, I use the examples of Germany and Italy, outlining and discussing various cultural and economic differences between them to show their incompatibility with a shared currency. I will substantiate this with a discussion of monetary policy, and will dissect …