The MIT Political Science Department and The Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University are sponsoring a seminar on formal and quantitative political research. The Program on Positive Political Economy (PPE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying "economic" behavior in the political process or "political" behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
The seminar will meet about twice per month, on Thursday afternoons from 4:30 to 6:00p.m. All interested faculty and students are invited to attend. The Fall Seminar Series will take place on the MIT campus (Bldg. E53 - Room 482, the Millikan Room).
September 17th
Rohini Pande (Harvard University)
"Can Voters Be Primed to Choose Better Legislators? Evidence from Two Field Experiments in India"
October 1st
Marco Migueis (MIT)
"Distributive Politics - The Case of Portuguese Municipalities"
October 8th
Josh Clinton (Vanderbilt University)
"Congress, Lawmaking, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1971-2000"
October 22nd
Allan Drazen (University of Maryland)
"Do Leaders Affect Government Spending Priorities?"
November 12th
Marc Flandreau (CEPR and The Graduate Institute, Geneva)
"The Microeconomics of Conditionality: Intermediaries' Prestige, External Adjustment and International Peace in 19th Century Government Bond Markets"
November 19th
Ebonya Washington (Yale University)
"Economics and Ideology: Causal Evidence of the Impact of Economic Conditions on Support for Redistribution and Other Ballot Proposals"
December 3rd
Micael Castanheira (Universite Libre De Bruxelles)
Title: "One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation"