Political Economy

Through its research, teaching, and course development, the Stanford GSB political economy group has consistently led the way in business schools’ awakening to the enormous impact of nonmarket forces on business practice and performance.

Political economy courses blend cutting-edge research with contemporary business cases. Spanning theory and practice as such provides future managers with systematic frameworks for understanding behavior outside the traditional sphere of markets. Important features of the nonmarket environment include strategic aspects of NGOs and activists; business-government relations in lawmaking, rulemaking, and regulation (locally and globally); the legal environment of business; and the interplay of strategy and ethics.

The political economy faculty is composed of world-class economists and political scientists whose research epitomizes the unique benefits of rigorous interdisciplinary social science. The faculty not only strives for excellence in its own research and teaching but also takes pride in its incomparable PhD Program, which regularly trains the world’s best new political economists.

Recent Journal Articles in Political Economy

Journal Article|
Keith Krehbiel, Christian Fong
American Political Science Review. February
2018, Vol. 112, Issue 1, Pages 1-14

Many institutions—including American federal bureaucracies and legislatures world-wide—are characterized by one set of actors who possess the right to determine which policies will be enacted and an opposing set of...

Joshua Kalla, David Broockman
American Political Science Review. February
2018, Vol. 112, Issue 1, Pages 148-166

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans’ candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’...

Kirk Bansak, Jeremy Ferwerda, Jens Hainmueller, Andrea Dillon, Dominik Hangartner, Duncan Lawrence
Science. January
19 , 2018, Vol. 359, Issue 6373, Pages 325-329

Developed democracies are settling an increased number of refugees, many of whom face challenges integrating into host societies. We developed a flexible data-driven algorithm that assigns refugees across resettlement locations...

Christopher McConnell, Yotam Margalit, Neil Malhotra, Matthew Levendusky
American Journal of Political Science. January
2018, Vol. 62, Issue 1, Pages 5-18

With growing affective polarization in the United States, partisanship is increasingly an impediment to cooperation in political settings. But does partisanship also affect behavior in nonpolitical settings? We show evidence...

Ken Shotts, Alexander V. Hirsch
Journal of Politics (forthcoming).
2018

We analyze a model of policymaking in which only one actor, e.g., a bureaucratic agency or a well-funded interest group, has the capacity to develop high-quality policy proposals. By virtue...