Center for Public Policy Events
The Hobby School of Public Affairs invites you to attend the Center for Public Policy speaker events.
Upcoming Speakers
Paula Rettl, Assistant Professor, Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School
Date: January 23, 2025
Time: TBD
Location: TBD
Paper title: Turning Away from the State: Trade Shocks and Informal Insurance in Brazil
Abstract: How does economic globalization affect vote choices? Conventional wisdom holds that voters who lose from economic integration support parties that propose expanding the welfare state. However, in the Global South, where the state is frequently weak or under-resourced, people often turn to non-state organizations (such as churches) for protection against economic decline. I argue that, in these contexts, negative globalization shocks increase local communities' dependence on non-state organizations, thereby making the leaders within such organizations more effective political brokers. To test this argument, I propose a shift-share instrument that measures the exposure of Brazilian local labor markets to exogenous changes in exports. By matching this instrument with electoral and survey data, I provide evidence that declining exports increased the power of evangelical leaders to persuade their congregations to vote against parties that favor welfare-state expansion. My findings help explain and describe the contingencies underlying the political consequences of globalization.
About the speaker: Paula Rettl is an Assistant Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. Her primary areas of expertise are comparative politics, political economy and political behavior, with a focus on Latin America and Europe. Professor Rettl’s research centers on how broad societal changes shape mass attitudes and behavior. For example, in some of her work, she examines how voters’ responses to globalization varies depending on whether they rely on the state or religious organizations for support during difficult economic times. In other work, she investigates how natural disasters shape voting behavior and the role played by economic interest in this context.
Todd Elder, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Economics, Michigan State University.
Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: TBD
Paper title: TBD
About the speaker: Todd Elder is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. His primary research interests lie in health economics and the economics of child development. He is currently studying skill formation and learning disability diagnoses among school-age children, with a focus on the influence of malleable school and classroom factors on the diagnoses of neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism and ADHD. Elder has also written extensively on the identification of the economic returns to private education and related measurement issues in the economics of education. Elder enjoys teaching courses that introduce students to measurement and identification issues, especially disentangling causal relationships from correlations found in observational data.
Highlights from Fall - 2024
Speaker: Dr. Andreea Stoian Karadeli, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Hobby School of Public AffairsCenter for Public Policy Speaker Series
Max Goplerud, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin
Date: Friday, October 25, 2024
Time: 10:30 am
Location: Bates - Herritage Room
Paper title: Multivariate MRP
Abstract: Measuring public opinion at sub-national geographies is critical to many theories in political science. Multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) is a popular tool for doing so, although existing work is limited to measuring opinion on a single survey question. We provide a framework for estimating the joint distribution of opinion on multiple questions (“Multivariate MRP”). To do so, we derive a novel method for variational inference with categorical outcomes and many random effects. Some approaches require performing variational inference with high-dimensional fixed effects, but we show that this can be done with little computational cost. We validate this procedure by estimating public opinion by party in the United States and show that existing methods can be improved considerably by adding contextual covariates on the prior levels of party identification. Substantively, we show how the output of multivariate MRP can be used to study representation across multiple policy issues simultaneously.
About the speaker: Max Goplerud is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His on-going research fits into two strands. First, he creates new methods to facilitate political science research by leveraging the intersection of Bayesian methods and machine learning. His working papers create new methods to tackle a variety of common problems (heterogeneous effects, hierarchical models, ideal point estimation) where existing methods have limitations that constrain substantive researchers. Second, he focuses on understanding legislative behaviour using text-as-data in a comparative context including studies on Europe, the United States, and Japan. His research on these topics and others has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Bayesian Analysis, Political Analysis, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. He received his PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2020 where he was an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies.
Hobby School of Public Affairs Center for Public Policy (CPP) & the Center for International and Comparative Studies (CICS)
2024 US Presidential Election: Implications for Foreign Policy
Speakers: Gail Buttorff, Tyson Chatagnier, Tobias Heinrich, Pauline Lemaire, Pablo Pinto, and Michael Soules
Moderator: Zachary Zwald, Director, CICS
Date: Monday, October 21, 2024
Time: 5:30 - 7:00 pm
Location: Bates - Herritage Room
Hobby School of Public AffairsCenter for Public Policy Speaker Series
Christopher Wlezien, Ph.D., Department of Government, UT Austin.
Date: Friday, October 18, 2024
Time: 11 am -12:30 pm
Location: Bates - Heritage Room
The US Presidential Election of 2024: How we Got Here, What to Expect, and Why? What explains that behavior? How did we get here (and there)? Christopher Wlezien provides some answers to these questions based on the history of presidential elections since 1952 as well as the particular circumstances of the 2024 cycle. He shows how the “fundamentals” that tend to matter on Election Day come into focus for voters and what this implies for the upcoming election.
About the speaker: Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government. He joined the University of Texas faculty in 2013 from Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously he taught at Oxford University, where he was Reader of Comparative Government and a Fellow of Nuffield College. While at Oxford, he co-founded the ESRC-funded Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. Before that, he taught at the University of Houston, where he was founding director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. His primary, ongoing research develops a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy and examines the dynamic interrelationships between preferences for spending and budgetary policy in various domains. His other major area of research addresses the evolution of voter preferences expressed in pre-election polls over the course of an election cycle.
Hobby School of Public AffairsCenter for Public Policy Speaker Series
David Leblang, Ph.D., Professor of Politics and Professor of Public Policy, University of Virginia
Date: Thursday, October 10, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Location: Bates - Heritage Room
Paper title: Does Immigration Policy Externalization Work? Evidence from the Western Hemisphere
Abstract: Governments allocate significant resources to control their borders; borders are, after all, a hallmark of state sovereignty. We contextualize border control within the context of human mobility and migration to understand if and how border control works. Specifically, we examine efforts related to externalization – policies designed to incentivize downstream neighbors to control and limit migration flows. We theorize that externalization may appear to deter migration but it more likely results in spatial and temporal deflection—moving migrants from one entry point to another or by delaying efforts at entry. Empirically we focus on migration in the Western Hemisphere, modeling the flow of migrants up through the Darien Gap and to the Southern Border of the United States. Using a series of hurdle models, we find that externalization policies alter the routes migrants take as they navigate towards their intended destinations. We complement these empirical findings with a qualitative analysis of US migration policy externalization efforts which seeks to curtail migration from two countries: Cuba and Venezuela.
About the Speaker: David Leblang is the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics and Professor of Public Policy. He is the Randolph Compton Professor of Public Affairs at the University’s Miller Center of Public Affairs where he is Director of Policy Studies. Leblang is a scholar of political economy with research interests in global migration and in the politics of financial markets. His recent publications include The Ties That Bind: Immigration and the Global Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023), “Labor Market Policy as Immigration Control: The Case of Temporary Protected Status” (International Studies Quarterly, 2022), and “Framing Unpopular Foreign Policies” (American Journal of Political Science, 2022). In 2015, Leblang was awarded the Outstanding Faculty Mentoring Award by the University of Virginia and in 2016 he received the Outstanding Mentoring Award from the Society of Women in International Political Economy of the International Studies Association. He is a devoted fan of Bruce Springsteen and the New York Mets, in that order.
Department of Economics and Hobby School of Public Affairs
Political Economy Speaker Series
Raquel Fernandez, Ph.D., Silver Professor of Economics, New York University.
Date: Friday, September 13, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Location: Bates 213
Paper title: Parental Leave: Economic Incentives and Cultural Change
Abstract: The distribution of parental leave uptake and childcare activities continues to conform to traditional gender roles. In 2002, with the goal of increasing gender equality, Sweden added a second “daddy month,” i.e., an additional month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. This policy increased men’s parental leave uptake and decreased women’s, thereby increasing men’s share. To understand how various factors contributed to these outcomes, we develop and estimate a quantitative model of the household in which preferences towards parental leave respond to peer behavior.We distinguish households by the education of the parents and ask the model to match key features of the parental leave distribution before and after the reform by gender and household type (the parents’ education). We find that changed incentives and, especially, changed social norms played an important role in generating these outcomes whereas changed wage parameters, including the future wage penalty associated with different lengths of parental leave uptake, were minor contributors. We then use our
model to evaluate three counterfactual policies designed to increase men’s share of parental leave and conclude that giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave or only paying for the length of time equally taken by each parent would both dramatically increase men’s share whereas decreasing childcare costs has almost no effect.