The Center for Political Economy’s Spring Showcase event highlighted the research projects of its current cohort of faculty and graduate student grantees.

Held Feb. 11 in The Forum, the day of programming spotlighted six of the nine research projects being funded this academic year by the Center, which was launched in 2022 as a cross-disciplinary site that deepens thinking about political economy and promotes developments within economics by connecting it to, among other fields, history, law, anthropology, political science, sociology, public health, and engineering. The showcase brought its projects, themes, and opportunities into focus through a series of presentations from its faculty grant recipients and a poster session led by its graduate student grant recipients.  

The research being conducted by the Center’s faculty grantees examines topics such as the social dimensions of forced disappearances, the impact of monetary policy on labor income inequality and credit, the market for climate expertise, and the political economy of economic development during the Enlightenment period through a political economy lens.

Bo Cowgill’s presentation offered a good example of such a topic, as it explored the claims by corporations that noncompete clauses do not have adverse effects on workers. A field experiment involving two firms and 1,400 job opportunities challenges that position, according to the findings by Cowgill, whose team includes Brandon Freiberg, a PhD student at Columbia Business School, and Evan P. Starr, associate professor at University of Maryland. 

“Number one, the noncompetes most definitely reduce mobility,” Cowgill said. “...The second thing is that the noncompetes also reduce earnings.” The experiment also showed that workers who had signed noncompetes shared secrets at the same rate as those who hadn’t.

Another project was presented by Claudio Lomnitz, the Campbell Family Professor and chair in the Anthropology Department at Columbia. The Social Study of Disappearance Lab is, a collaboration between Columbia and Barnard faculty, the Columbia library, and multiple Mexican institutions that aims to shift the public knowledge and memorialization of disappearance. Lomnitz began his research in 2019 reaching out to collectives of the disappeared in Mexico, well before the Center became his first source of support. 

“Mexico, as many of you know officially, has, like 120,000 disappeared persons right now, and that number is most is certainly an undercount,” said Lomnitz, whose team includes Naor Ben-Yehoyada, assistant professor in the Anthropology Department, Columbia University, and Nara Milanich, professor in the History Department, Barnard College. The team, along with groups of student volunteers, performed context analysis with the collectives in the state of Zacatecas in North Central Mexico. 

The projects being led by the Center’s graduate student grantees explore the intersections between economic structures and political dynamics across historical and contemporary contexts. Their research offers insights into, for example, the role of media in labor organizing, the evolution of colonial labor and welfare policies, and labor activism among migrant workers in platform economies. 

Other student grant projects investigate the intersection of land, labor, and caste in India’s small towns, the impact of AI-driven workplace automation, and the effects of extreme weather on hourly workers, as well as firm growth constraints in developing economies, corporate responses to climate disasters, and the relationship between free trade and protectionism in economic policy. Collectively, these projects further enrich and expand political economy as a field of study.