It was a real pleasure to present my work this week at the Center for Study of Public Choice at @georgemasonu.bsky.social. Many thanks to @markkoyama.bsky.social @jonathanschulz.bsky.social and @vincentgeloso.bsky.social for the kind invitation and great discussion! publicchoice.gmu.edu/events/17530

Overall, the paper tries to translate insights from multiple fields on how kinship promotes cooperation into political economy (strategic setting + micro-foundations + causal identification) to study how capitalism works in many parts of the world, and how "the state" and "society" interact. 16/n

To our knowledge, this is the first paper to show how family ties solve a high-stakes cooperation problem in a contemporary setting, not just historically or in small-scale societies, but in large corporations facing strategic dilemmas. Kinship in action! 12/n

Crucially, the ban activated cooperation among family members: we find evidence of influence (“peer effects”) in their contribution decisions. It altered the social logic of contributions, turning them into strategic complements. 10/n

Zooming in on individuals, using data on over 12K businesspeople, members of controlling families started contributing as private citizens after the ban. This behavior was driven by those in firms that had made corporate contributions before the ban. 9/n

Yes—and here’s how. Family firms replaced corporate contributions with individual ones, while non-family firms didn’t. This result holds across a rich set of controls, including ownership concentration. 8/n

In our World Development paper, we showed that family firms can craft long-term relational contracts with politicians thanks to their long time horizons. This turns them into political heavyweights: more likely to fund political campaigns and extract rents: doi.org/10.1016/j.wo... 4/n

Family firms are less productive but also long-lived and a staple of capitalism in developing countries. Why? The answer to this puzzle may lie in politics. We identify two mechanisms that may explain family firms’ political behavior: *long time horizons* and *collective action capacity*. 3/n

Market economies are embedded in social institutions. In this project, we try to illuminate a long-standing feature of capitalism in the Global South and elsewhere—the prevalence of family-based capitalism. Project summary
@promarket.bsky.social: www.promarket.org/2023/07/24/f...

🚨Thrilled🚨 that my paper "Family Ties as Corporate Power" (with @jdodyk.bsky.social and I. Puente) is now available as "just accepted" at the @thejop.bsky.social . Working Paper: doi.org/10.1086/736563