From Rivals to Partners: The Alignment of Capital and State Coercion in the Rise of Modern Economic Growth
Ernesto Dal Bó, Professor
Business, Haas School
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2023 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2024.
The conventional wisdom on the source of economic growth emphasizes inclusive institutions: constraints on state elites, which allow open access to political and economic power. Yet, in many contexts where economic growth has emerged, we see the partnership of powerful, coercive (often nondemocratic) states and private enterprise: from Industrial Revolution Britain, to the post-WWII Asian economic tigers, to post-Mao China. Focusing on the emergence of modern growth in Britain, we propose a model of a partnership between coercive states and private actors: merchants lend money to the state, which is used to develop coercive capacity. In our model, good institutions are an outcome, rather than a cause of increased economic activity, and the good outcome is driven by aligned incentives, not political inclusion.
Role: Our goal is to match research assistants to tasks based on interest and skills. We expect research assistants to mainly contribute to the empirical and data-intensive aspects of the project. We use Python, R and Stata. Tasks include, for example:
1) Collecting and digitizing novel archival data
2) Web scraping and Optical Character Recognition of historical records
3) Combining data from multiple sources to construct new data sets
4) Working with “text as data” using machine learning and natural language processing
5) Analyzing the data using econometric methods
6) Visualizing the results in graphs and maps
Qualifications: Data analysis skills. For example coding in Python, R and Stata to perform data analysis. Familiarity with web scraping and natural language processing (NLP) techniques is also valuable.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Lukas Leucht, Ph.D. candidate
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Related website: https://haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/dalbo-ernesto/
Engineering, Design & Technologies Social Sciences