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Government Policy, Housing, and the Origins of Securitization, 1780 - 1968
Get PDFIn 1968 the Johnson Administration transformed Fannie Mae, the federal agency responsible for supporting the nation's secondary mortgage market, into a privately owned but federally supported company called a Government Sponsored Entity. The Administration also implemented a policy that promoted mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a financial technology that would revolutionize global finance thirty years later. This dissertation investigates the origins of those policies. Drawing from original archival research and the secondary literature on housing and credit in the U.S., I show that a long history of government officials acting like agents in U.S. housing and credit markets contributed to the rise of the securitization market in the U.S. at the end of the twentieth century. The dissertation first describes the deeply rooted historical forces that affected the 1968 mortgage finance reforms. These forces include: a set of contradictions in the field of housing that began in the revolutionary period; government officials' tendency to use indirect policy tools, like federal credit aid programs, to manage housing and credit markets, and; since the 1930s, the use of increasingly complex debt instruments to manipulate the federal budget. Having outlined these forces, and discussed how they came to a head in the midst of the 1960s, I next investigate the mechanisms through which the Johnson Administration came to choose to spin-off Fannie Mae and promote the MBS market. I find that contentious budget politics were especially important in directing the policy. I conclude that in the 1960s these policies were adopted because (i) they promised to help solve long-standing problems in the housing market without spending scarce government dollars, and (ii) because they helped President Johnson manage a budget deficit already extended due to the combination of the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs.This dissertation joins to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the notion that the American state is weak and its markets laissez-faire. Building on this literature, I argue that (i) federal credit programs are an important but often-overlooked point of federal intervention into the economy, and that (ii) the structure of federal budget politics is one important reason why federal intervention in the economy often remains indirect and complex. Through this case study, I argue that a sprawling and fragmented political structure, combined with the use of indirect policy tools, are important reasons why U.S. government programs tend to be easily misrecognized or overlooked
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A Healthy Business: The evolution of the U.S. market for prescription drugs
Get PDFTwo central questions motivate my dissertation: First, how do variations in the political, social, or technological environment produce changes in the organization and orientation of pharmaceutical firms? Second, do these transformations alter either the kind or quality of new drugs that reach the market? To answer these, I study how the market originated in the 1940s and how the social, economic, and political pressures of the subsequent decades molded the firms and their orientation to produce both the market and medicine that we have today. The research combines interviews with pharmaceutical executives and archival research into corporate histories, along with previously unexamined accounts of the government's role in establishing a more robust industry in the 1940s, to motivate a series of hypotheses. These hypotheses are tested using time series and event history methods on organizational and financial variables for the population of pharmaceutical firms between 1935 and 2005. The findings help explain the ability of pharmaceutical firms to mitigate the consequence of environmental changes and to reproduce their market, and their profits, despite the repeated intervention of powerful actors
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Labor and the Elderly in the Welfare Retrenchment Era: Institutions and Collective Action in the Public Pension Reforms of Affluent Democracies
Get PDFThis dissertation seeks to explain cross-national differences in the evolution of public pension programs in 21 affluent democracies between 1980 and 2002. Despite a burgeoning literature, critical aspects of pension policy variations such as generosity levels and the passage of retrenching reforms have been inadequately or insufficiently analyzed. The first part of the dissertation describes the type of structural and gradual reforms passed during this period. It shows that most reforms were gradual. Only five countries overhauled their pension policies, while all countries introduced retrenching recalibrations of benefit or coverage levels. Thus, although pension policy has not been dismantled, it has been substantially redesigned across affluent democracies. The second part of the dissertation explains cross-national variations in three pension policy dimensions. First are examined the reasons for the extensive differences in the generosity of old-age pensions for just-retired individuals. Using cross-sectional time-series regression techniques and pension replacement rates for fixed individuals, I show that the power of the elderly (and not class struggles) determined the level of pension generosity. Second, I conduct the first event history (EH) analysis of the passage of retrenching pension reforms. A synthetic review of the pension policy literature reveals that a total of 53 retrenching pension reforms were passed. Further, EH models demonstrate that high public deficits and the gap between the growth rates of social security outlays and revenues drove those retrenchments. A third development during this period involved the enactment of structural pension reforms. To explain how one structural reform was possible, I compare the pension politics leading to the Italian 1995 transition to a notional-defined-contribution (NDC) system and the Spanish 1997 non-structural reform. Based on qualitative evidence, I argue that Italian union leaders sought and imposed the NDC model which eliminated regressiveness suffered by the unions' rank-and-file. By contrast, Spanish union leaders did not seek alternative policy models because public sector workers dominated their rank-and-file and benefited from pension regressiveness. The final study examines attitudinal cleavages on pension policy preferences. It shows that a larger tax wedge and lower elderly poverty rate moderate the higher likelihood of the elderly to demand more pension spending. Thus, the U.S. lacks an age cleavage on pension policy preferences due to a lower tax wedge and higher elderly poverty rate
The architecture of markets: An economic sociology of Twenty-First Century capitalist societies
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Reengineering Elite Universities: Massive Open Online Courses and the Rise of Applied Science in American Higher Education
Get PDFIn the early 2000s a small handful of computer science and artificial intelligence researchers stitched together a platform to teach undergraduate computer science courses to tens of thousands of students simultaneously. These course, which became known as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) instigated a wave of debate about the future of higher education, as well as a series of reforms at campuses across the country. This dissertation analyzes why this moment materialized in 2012, and how three elite universities at its center crafted organizational strategies in response. Using field theory and literature on academic capitalism, this dissertation will argue that MOOCs were a recent flashpoint in the increasing competition over leadership in academic computer science that is collapsing historical distinctions between arts and science universities and applied science schools. Part I analyzes the origins of the MOOC movement and charts changes in frames within the field using LDA topic modeling to show that online higher education moved from the periphery of the field of higher education to its center in the early 2010s. Part II leverages 45 primary interviews with leaders of three campuses most closely associated with the MOOC movement: Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. The analysis shows that Stanford administrators responded to unanticipated and provocative actions from entrepreneurial faculty members with the creation of a for-profit MOOC spin-off. While these actions conformed to theories of academic capitalism, the ultimate diffusion of MOOCs across the country led universities in Cambridge to reject profit as a central consideration in their strategic response, demonstrating that academic capitalism is not necessarily contagious. This dissertation argues that the tools of field theory provide insight into competition over the future of higher education which is contested along multiple simultaneous dimensions. Rather than competition over revenue, MOOCs represented intensification of overlap in the field of higher education between tradition arts and science based incumbents, and newly ascendant universities more closely associated with applied science and engineering
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Essays on Mass-Participatory Finance Capitalism in the United States
No full textThis dissertation examines three interrelated questions about the patterns, causes, and consequences of mass-participatory financial activity in the United States during the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. The first chapter examines the economic geography of speculative investment during the mid-2000s housing bubble. Here I utilize Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data to test hypotheses about the community-level correlates of non-occupant housing purchase rates across U.S. counties. The second chapter takes up the question of why household indebtedness in the U.S. doubled from 1989-2007? I assess the empirical implications of alternative theoretical accounts using household-level data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. The third chapter addresses social stratification within mass-participatory investment markets by analyzing racial disparities in timing of entrance into the housing bubble. I use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to assess the mechanisms that account for minorities' heightened likelihood of purchasing a house during the later years of the bubble. Together, the analyses contribute to sociological understandings of mass-participatory finance. They also draw new theoretical connections between the economic sociology of finance, stratification, urban sociology, and behavioral economics
A transformação do controle corporativo
No full textResenha: FLIGSTEIN, Neil. The Transformation of Corporate Control. Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press Cambridge, 1990
Three Essays on the Pretrial Process
Get PDFThe pretrial process is an important but often overlooked aspect of criminal justice contact. The decisions and activities that take place between arrest and case resolution both heavily influence case outcomes and constitute important forms of criminal justice contact in themselves. Yet surprisingly few studies have re-visited the pretrial process since the punitive turn of the 1980s and 90s. This dissertation consists of three empirical papers that contribute to an emerging literature analyzing contemporary criminal courts and the pretrial process in the era of mass arrest and incarceration.The first paper examines pretrial detention and release patterns. Despite growing interest in bail and pretrial detention among both academic researchers and policymakers, systematic research on pretrial release remains limited. This paper examines bail and pretrial release practices across 75 large US counties from 1990-2009 and look at the contextual correlates of bail regime severity. It finds tremendous intra-county variation in bail practices, as well as a nationwide decline in the use of non-financial release and doubling of bail amounts during this period. This variation is not accounted for by differences in case composition across jurisdictions or over time. Patterns of bail practices are associated with political, socioeconomic, and demographic factors, however. Implications of these findings for future research on bail and pretrial detention are discussed.The second paper draws on fieldwork in two California counties to analyze how courts manage access to drug treatment in the context of criminal prosecution. California’s multiple diversion programs channel tens of thousands of people into drug treatment every year, making criminal contact an important point of entry into counseling and medical care for substance abuse and related issues in the state. Drawing on direct observations in courts and interviews with the attorneys, judges, and counselors who staff them, this paper argues that the adversarial structure of the court fundamentally shapes the way treatment is understood and accessed in criminal cases. Attorneys handling these cases are driven by professional mandates to seek particular case outcomes, with prosecutors focused on securing convictions and appropriately punitive sentences, and defense attorneys focused on getting charges dropped and limiting punishment for their clients. While specific practices vary across the two counties I study, treatment decisions in both jurisdictions are based fundamentally on a defendant’s charges and criminal record with little consideration of the nature of a defendant’s substance use or treatment needs. The introduction of drug treatment into criminal case processing was thus less transformative than either supporters or critics suggest, as the priorities of criminal case processing frequently conflict with the ostensible goals of medical interventions, distorting and undermining the therapeutic aspirations of these reforms.The final paper examines the often overlooked role of judges in managing misdemeanor cases. While misdemeanors make up more than eighty percent of criminal cases filed in the U.S. each year, much of what we know about how courts process these cases in the modern era comes from studies of large, well-resourced court systems in major U.S. cities. This paper adds to this literature by analyzing misdemeanor courts in a smaller, peri-urban jurisdiction, where more limited resources result in less attorney oversight of misdemeanor cases. Drawing on observations of nearly seven hundred arraignments, it finds that judges play an important role in shaping both pretrial decisions and outcomes in misdemeanor cases. Without attorneys present at arraignments, judges take on elements of both prosecution and defense as they facilitate, discourage, or refuse guilty pleas from defendants in attempts to maintain local norms for case outcomes. This dynamic has surprising implications for defendants in custody. Although pretrial detention is generally seen as a practice that incentivizes guilty pleas, the pretrial detainees I observed were systematically kept from pleading guilty, as they were less likely to be facing the sort of routine cases that judges were willing to resolve with standard sentences at arraignment. While this protects defendants’ due process rights, it may also lead to more extensive forms of informal pretrial punishment
The architecture of markets: An economic sociology of Twenty-First Century capitalist societies
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The Corporation’s Center Cannot Hold: Losses, Outside CEO Hires, and Acquisitions at Public US Corporations
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the profitability and management of public US corporations since the 1950s. I argue that a shift in their ability to turn a profit helps us understand why today’s corporations are run more as portfolios of assets than as organic wholes. Even while aggregate corporate profits have risen, public US corporations have become more likely to fail to turn a profit since the 1970s. Losses—instances of negative net income—are a signal a firm is not a good candidate for long-term organic growth. As a result, widespread losses at public US firms today encourage corporate managers and boards to focus on acquiring and divesting assets—whether business units, executives, or technologies—rather than committing locked-in investments to generate economic value in the long run. This dissertation focuses on two corporate strategies that encapsulate this view that corporations are portfolios of exchangeable assets: outside CEO succession—CEOs being hired from outside the firm rather than promoted from within—and acquisitions. I present evidence that high losses at public US corporations since the 1990s have contributed to elevated rates of outside CEO hiring and acquisitions and are therefore a material basis of the corporation-as-portfolio perspective. This suggests that understanding why losses are so high at public US corporations—the average yearly loss rate has been over 33% since 1985 and higher in recent years—is important for gauging the health of the American economy.The dissertation centers on three empirical studies. The first two focus on outside CEO succession at large public corporations. In the first empirical chapter, I examine how losses and other measures of firm performance predict outside CEO hiring at 317 of the largest public US corporations between 1950 and 2015, defined as those ranked in the top 110 by revenue at least once based on 5-year snapshots. New CEOs hired directly from outside the firm were rare at these large firms before 1990, increased sharply in the 1990s, and have remained elevated in the 21st century. I bridge the gap between two important but disconnected lines of research on American corporations—one focused on the shareholder value movement, the other on changes in corporate profits—to trace this devaluation of inside managers to a previously undocumented rise in low-profit spells at large corporations. Despite increased median profits, large public US corporations have become much more likely to fail to turn a profit. These losses encouraged subsequent outside CEO hiring through the 1990s, and rising losses help explain 30% of the late-20th-century increase in outside hires at these large firms. After 2000, outside CEO hires remained common and became primarily a response to low stock return. This chapter extends the well-documented effect of poor profitability on outside CEO hiring to provide one of the first estimates of how changing corporate profits have reshaped corporate governance. Rising losses in the 1980s-1990s pressed large corporations to frequently change course and increased demand for outside CEOs meant to promote this flexibility.The second empirical chapter turns to the cultural change and stability that accompanied this rise in outside CEO hires. I analyze text from news articles announcing CEO hires at the 150 largest firms of my sample (i.e., firms ranked in the top 50 by revenue at least once based on 5-year snapshots 1950-2015). I use two supervised machine learning models commonly used for text analysis—support vector machines and random forests—to predict whether a new CEO was hired from outside or inside the firm based on words and phrases from the announcement articles. After evaluating which model and hyperparameters yielded the best predictions, I consider feature importance scores from models trained on articles from three distinct periods—1950-1989, 1990-2000, and 2001-2015—to examine the language characterizing outside CEO hires when they were rare, rising, and high at large corporations. I find that despite churn in the words and phrases used to describe outside CEOs, there is a consistent model of outside succession across the sample period: outside CEOs were hired to be strong managers of poor performing firms. Yet in the 1990s, when outside succession was rising sharply at these firms in response to increased losses, outside hire announcements became longer, more distinctive, and more focused on pressures from consumer and equity markets. Finally, after 2000 outside hire announcements became more highly rationalized, focusing less on outside CEOs’ status and more on the concrete work experiences that made them qualified for the job. These results connect sociological accounts of the search for charismatic CEOs during the shareholder value revolution to financial economic explanations of executive mobility focused on transferable skills.In the final study, I broaden my scope to all public US corporations to investigate the connection between historically high losses and acquisitions between 1973 and 2019 and how these have contributed to rising concentration within US industries since the 1990s. Research on this rising market concentration tends to focus on the strategies of high-profit star firms. Yet economic and organizational sociology have long argued that profitability crises and organizational death are key drivers of economic change, and I draw on these perspectives to analyze the flip side of rising monopoly power in the United States. To do this, I connect rising market concentration to not just high rates of losses but also a sharp decline in the number of public US corporations over the past twenty-five years. I examine how today’s high losses could have contributed to rising market concentration through increased acquisitions, a primary driver of the falling number of public firms. I find evidence that losses encourage firms to be acquired and that high acquisitions rates since the mid-1990s have contributed to increases in the concentration of sales within industries. In contrast, loss rates within industries do not seem to drive concentration increases. These results demonstrate that corporate weakness and not just strength have contributed to rising market concentration. Public US corporations have routinely failed to turn a profit in past decades, and we should recognize that this has hindered stable and widespread economic growth: not only have losses encouraged outside CEO hiring, they have also contributed to high acquisition rates, and this has increased market concentration among public US firms
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