Books in the Cornell Studies in Political Economy series

Sinclair offers a highly accessible account of bond rating agencies: their origins and the rating processes they use to judge creditworthiness. Illustrated with a wide range of cases, this book offers a fresh assessment of the role of an often-overlooked institution in the dynamics of modern global capitalism.

Small states have learned in recent decades that capital accumulates where taxes are low; as a result, tax havens have increasingly competed for the attention of international investors with tax and regulatory concessions. Economically powerful...

Do people's beliefs help to explain foreign policy decisions, or is political activity better understood as the self-interested behavior of key actors?

In this book, German sociologists and American and Japanese political scientists draw extensively on the work of economists and historians from their home countries, as well as from the United Kingdom and France.

Whose Ideas Matter? is the first book to explore the diffusion of ideas and norms in the international system from the perspective of local actors, with Asian regional institutions as its main focus.

Nonviolent state behavior in Japan, this book argues, results from the distinctive breadth with which the Japanese define security policy, making it inseparable from the quest for social stability through economic growth. While much of the literature...

In Globalizing in Hard Times, Leonardo Martinez-Diaz examines the sudden and substantial increase in cross-border ownership of commercial banks in countries where bank ownership had long been restricted by local rules. Many parties-the World Bank and...

During the economic reforms of the last twenty years, China adopted a wide array of policies designed to raise its technological capability and foster industrial growth. Ideologically, the government would not promote private-ownership firms and...

Cioffi argues that highly politicized reform of corporate governance law has reshaped power relations within the public corporation in favor of financial interests, contributed to the profound crises of capitalism, and eroded its political foundations.

How do states know what they want? Asking how interests are defined and how changes in them are accommodated, Martha Finnemore shows the fruitfulness of a constructivist approach to international politics. She draws on insights from sociological...

Applying a social-constructivist approach to her richly detailed case history, Audie Jeanne Klotz demonstrates that normative standards such as racial equality can serve as much more than a weak constraint on fundamental strategic concerns.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, imperial powers controlled most of the globe. Within a few decades after World War II, many of the great empires had dissolved, and more recently, multinational polities have similarly disbanded. This process of...

What are the relative merits of the American and European socioeconomic systems? Long-standing debates have heated up in recent years with the expansion of the European Union and increasingly sharp political and cultural differences between the United...

Wherever there is money, there is money politics-a subject demanding ever greater attention at a time when monetary policies lead and the real economy follows. A principal defining characteristic of the contemporary global economy, Jonathan Kirshner...

Kiren Aziz Chaudhry shows how state and market institutions are created and transformed in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, two countries that typify labor and oil exporters in the developing worlds.

Far from being an inevitably aggressive and destructive force, nationalism is, for Ernst B. Haas, the primary means of bringing coherence to modernizing societies.

Japanese scholars have begun to challenge conventional wisdom about effective labor organizing, and Ikuo Kume has written the first book in English to advance their controversial theory. Since at least the early 1980s, the power of organized labor has...

It is often said economics has become as important as security in international relations, yet we work with much less than full understanding of what goes on when government negotiators bargain over trade, finance, and the rules of international...

After the devastation of World War II, Germany and Japan built national capitalist institutions that were remarkably successful in terms of national reconstruction and international competitiveness. Yet both "miracles" have since faltered, allowing...

A distinguished group of experts, including historians, polling data analysts, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists, to explore global anti-Americanism in depth, using both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Over the past fifteen years, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan have transformed the relationship between governments and corporations. The changes are complex and the terms used to describe them often obscure the reality. In Freer Markets...

West Germany from 1949 to 1990 was a story of virtually unparalleled political and economic success. This economic miracle incorporated a well-functioning political democracy, expanded to include a "social partnership" system of economic...

Tomas Larsson argues that institutional underdevelopment may prove, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage rather than a weakness and that external threats play an important role in shaping the development of property regimes.

The idea of European unity, which the Nordic states have historically resisted, has recently become the foremost concern of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland. Christine Ingebritsen provides a timely analysis of Nordic economic and security...

The quasi-federal European Union stands out as the major exception in the thinly institutionalized world of international politics. Something has led Europeans-and only Europeans-beyond the nation-state to a fundamentally new political architecture...

China began opening to the outside world in 1978. This process was designed to remain under the state's control. But the relative value of goods and services inside and outside China drove cities, enterprises, local governments, and individuals with...

Developmental state, n.: the government, motivated by desire for economic advancement, intervenes in industrial affairs. The notion of the developmental state has come under attack in recent years. Critics charge that Japan's success in putting this...