A talk of interest to COR community…

“Borrowing Credibility: Global Banks and Monetary Regimes.”

Professor Jana Grittersova
University of California, Riverside

Friday, January 25, 2019

2:00-3:30pm

Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

*Graduate students are encouraged to meet with Prof. Grittersova immediately following her talk in SSPB 5226, 3:30-4pm.*

Abstract:

Nations with credible monetary regimes borrow at lower interest rates in international markets and are less likely to suffer speculative attacks and currency crises. Whereas scholars typically attribute credibility to either domestic institutions or international agreements, I argue that when reputable multinational banks, headquartered in Western Europe or North America, open branches and subsidiaries within a nation, they can enhance its monetary credibility. Such multinational banks enhance credibility in several ways. First, they promote financial transparency in the local financial system. Second, they improve the quality of banking regulation and supervision in host countries. Finally, the banks serve as private lenders of last resort. Reputable multinational banks provide an enforcement mechanism, ensuring that publicized economic policies will be carried out. I examine actual changes in government behavior in nations trying to gain legitimacy in international financial markets and the ways international perceptions of these nations change because of the presence of multinational banks. I test my credibility theory by combining statistical analyses of more than eighty emerging market economies over the period from 1995 to 2009 with comparative case studies of credibility building in Estonia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Argentina, and Ukraine, as well as the global financial crisis of 2008 drawing upon 120 field interviews. The book illuminates the complex interactions between multinational banks and national policymaking that characterize the process of financial globalization and reveals the importance of market confidence in a world of mobile capital.

Bio:  Jana Grittersová is an associate professor of political science and a cooperating faculty in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Economics in Bratislava, Slovakia. She has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, and has worked at the European Commission in Brussels and the central bank of Slovakia. Her published and ongoing research focuses on the sources of government reputation in international markets, political perceptions of monetary policy, the impact of interest groups on monetary and financial policies, global banking, the role of non-market coordination in financial-system development, and the political economy of reform. Her book Borrowing Credibility: Global Banks and Monetary Regimes (University of Michigan Press, 2017) explores how countries with new histories, failed economic policies, and weak institutions establish monetary credibility in international financial markets. She has received grants from the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, the Russel Sage Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Political Science Association, and the British Chevening award, among others.

Dear COR colleagues,

***Friday, January 18, 2019, 12-1:30pm, SBSG 1321

Erin Lockwood, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UCI

Discussants: Professor Bill Maurer (Social Sciences), Professor David Min (Law)

Title: Regulating Risk: Explaining the Unchecked Growth of Financial Derivatives

Abstract: This paper begins from the question of how the market for financial derivatives was allowed to grow as large as it did on the eve of the crisis in the absence of public regulation. The answer, I contend, can be found in the history of how derivatives markets evolved in close relationship with changing regulatory views of risk: what it is, who are the legitimate bearers of risk, and which actors deserve public protection from downside risk. Drawing on public regulatory documents, speeches, and testimony about derivatives from the early 20th century to the early 21st century, I trace the process through which derivatives came to be seen as legitimate financial products and the derivatives market as capable of self-regulation. The resulting analytical narrative shows that regulatory views of risk change in response to financial innovation, shifts in beliefs about the appropriate relationship between states and financial markets, and financial crisis. Regulatory understandings of risk have shaped how regulators have interpreted and regulated derivatives: financial innovations, which commodify risk itself. This analysis has important implications for understanding the regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis and directs our attention to the conditions of possibility for future, potentially more effective, change in financial governance.

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by January 11 to receive the paper to read before the workshop.

Light lunch will be provided.

Best wishes,

Nina Bandelj and Melissa Mazmanian
COR Co-Directors

Dear friends and colleagues,

We wish the whole of our COR community and beyond – Happy Holidays!

Before you start enjoying a well-deserved break, we ask you to put two exciting COR events on your schedule for early 2019.

Friday, January 18: COR paper development workshop with Professor Erin Lockwood on derivatives and financial regulation, UCI (discussed by Professors Bill Maurer and David Min)

Friday, February 22: COR Colloqium with Professor Kathrin Sele (Aalto University School of Business, Finland) on organizational routines of ordering food (which ends up ordering you!).

See below for more information and RSVP contact.

We look forward to seeing many of you at 2019 COR events!

Warmest wishes,

Nina Bandelj and Melissa Mazmanian
COR Co-Directors

* * * * * * * * * *

Friday, January 18, 2019, 12-1:30pm, SBSG 1321

Erin Lockwood, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UCI Discussants: Professor Bill Maurer (Social Sciences), Professor David Min (Law)

Title: Regulating Risk: Explaining the Unchecked Growth of Financial Derivatives

Abstract: This paper begins from the question of how the market for financial derivatives was allowed to grow as large as it did on the eve of the crisis in the absence of public regulation. The answer, I contend, can be found in the history of how derivatives markets evolved in close relationship with changing regulatory views of risk: what it is, who are the legitimate bearers of risk, and which actors deserve public protection from downside risk. Drawing on public regulatory documents, speeches, and testimony about derivatives from the early 20th century to the early 21st century, I trace the process through which derivatives came to be seen as legitimate financial products and the derivatives market as capable of self-regulation. The resulting analytical narrative shows that regulatory views of risk change in response to financial innovation, shifts in beliefs about the appropriate relationship between states and financial markets, and financial crisis. Regulatory understandings of risk have shaped how regulators have interpreted and regulated derivatives: financial innovations, which commodify risk itself. This analysis has important implications for understanding the regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis and directs our attention to the conditions of possibility for future, potentially more effective, change in financial governance.

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu by January 7 to receive the paper to read before the workshop.

* * * * * * * * * *

Friday, February 22, 12noon, SBSG 1321

COR Colloquium with Professor Kathrin Sele, Aalto University School of
Business, Finland

Title: “When the Food You Order Ends up Ordering You: A Rhythmanalysis Perspective on Temporal Order(ing)”

Professor Sele’s research focuses on organizational routines and their role in innovation and strategy making with a particular focus on sociomaterial and temporal aspects as well as on discursive practices and rhetorical strategies in legitimation processes. Dr. Sele completed her PhD at St. Gallen University. After graduation she worked at Toulouse School of Management first as a teaching fellow and then as a maître de conférences (assistant professor).

For more information: https://people.aalto.fi/kathrin.sele

Dear colleagues,

You are invited to a colloquium of interest to COR community….

Friday, November 16, 2018
10:30-12:00pm
Lyman Porter Colloquium Room (SB1 5200)

Speaker: Sam Friedman, Associate Professor of Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Sociology

Title: The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged

Abstract: The hidden barriers, or ‘glass ceilings’, preventing women and minority ethnic groups from getting to the top are well documented. Yet questions of social class – and specifically class origin – have been curiously absent from these debates. In this talk I begin by drawing on new data from Britain’s largest employment survey, The Labour Force Survey, to demonstrate that a powerful and previously unrecognised “class pay gap” exists in Britain’s higher professional and managerial
occupations. I then switch focus to ask why this pay gap exists. This analysis demonstrates that the class ceiling can only be very partially attributed to conventional measures of ‘merit’. Instead, drawing on 175 interviews across four occupational case studies – television, accountancy, architecture, and acting – I show that more powerful drivers are rooted in the misrecognition of classed self-presentation as ‘talent’, work cultures historically shaped by the privileged, the affordances of the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, and sponsored mobility premised on class-cultural homophily.