The decision to privatize: economists and the construction of ideas and policies

Professional ties that bind: how normative orientations shape IMF conditionality

“…Measuring policy beliefs is a challenging task, and my approach (Chwieroth 2007;2013a) and that of others (Kogut and MacPherson 2008;Weymouth and MacPherson 2012) has been to use the professional training characteristics of policymakers as a proxy for normative consensus. While there may be better approaches for capturing shared beliefs, such as direct surveys of IMF and country officials, these are empirically near impossible.…”

Signalling Demand for Foreign Investment: Postsocialist Countries in the Global Bilateral Investment Treaties Network

“…We argue that institutional efforts to open economies to FDI happened as part and parcel of neoliberal policy diffusion (Henisz et al 2005;Kogut & Macpherson 2007;Lim & Tsutsui 2012), and did not translate into actual FDI flows due to decoupling between policies and practices in uncertain economic environments of market transition (Borocz 2000;Bandelj 2008b). Dynamic panel regression models show that the BIT count is a poor predictor of FDI into postsocialist countries for the 1990-2009 period, with or without considering alternative FDI determinants.…”

Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession

“…Moreover, the disciplinary feud of the 1970s occurred mainly within the subfield of macroeconomics; microeconomics was arguably less affected. Sociologists and political scientists studying the economics profession and its political influence also observe policy consensus, though they tend to emphasize the "neoclassical" or "neoliberal" orientation of the contemporary field (Babb 2001;Blyth 2002;Chwieroth 2007;Kogut and Macpherson 2007). At the paradigmatic level, relative to other social sciences, economists agree more on standards of research quality and see their field as independent of politics (Lamont 2009; Fourcade et al 2015); moreover, U.S. economists tend to show greater consensus than those in other countries (Fourcade 2009).…”

“…Some sociologists argue that these policy statements have substantial practical impact, particularly as the discipline's increasing emphasis on market efficiency "provided part of the intellectual rationale for the deregulatory movement in public policy and the expanded use of the price and market mechanism" (Fourcade et al 2015:105) in a variety of policy areas (c.f. Babb 2001;Blyth 2002;Campbell 1998;Chwieroth 2007;Kogut and Macpherson 2007). However, as Reay (2012:46) argues, this literature has produced something of a paradox: although many studies see the profession as a powerful, unified juggernaut, others (including many economists themselves) view the discipline as fragmented and weak.…”