Production Complexity as Appropriation Protection
Abstract: Scholars have long suggested that a technology gap between firms and developing countries protects firms' assets. How can we capture this intuitive idea that what firms make and how they make it affects their appropriation risk? And under what conditions would we expect firms to rely on a technology gap as a risk-mitigating strategy? This book aims to address these questions. I make three main arguments: First, firms' production complexity---the products they make and the process by which they make them---affects their relationship with governments. Second, production complexity can protect firms from appropriation by increasing the technical expertise bureaucrats need to appropriate. Third, bureaucratic capacity with respect to firms moderates the relationship between firms' production complexity and their appropriation risk. This theory leads to two testable hypotheses: (1) bureaucratic capacity moderates the relationship between firms' production complexity and their appropriation risk and (2) in states with low bureaucratic capacity, firms with more complex production will have lower appropriation risk than firms with less complex production. I test these hypotheses by relying on both in-country interviews and firm-level panel data. The qualitative analysis draws on both cross-country variation in bureaucratic capacity and within-country variation in production complexity. The quantitative analysis holds bureaucratic capacity constant by focusing on one country, leveraging variation in firms' production complexity and their experiences with appropriation. There are three key findings of this research. First, production complexity has a negative relationship with costs of appropriation to firms. Second, a lack of bureaucratic capacity with respect to firms is the causal mechanism driving this negative relationship. Third, production complexity has a positive relationship with bureaucrats' efforts to appropriate. These findings demonstrate that production complexity is both a firm-level determinant of firms' appropriation risk and something firms can rely on to protect themselves from appropriation in contexts with low bureaucratic capacity. They also suggest that bureaucrats and firms play a ``cat-and-mouse game,'' where production complexity makes firms a target for appropriation, while also decreasing how much is actually appropriated. This book contributes to research on firm-level determinants of appropriation risk; strategies firms use to protect themselves from appropriation; and the ways in which firms' protective strategies affect their political power and behavior, as well as states' capacity.
"Hiding in Plain Sight: Production Complexity as Appropriation Protection."
Abstract: Scholars have long suggested that a technology gap between firms and developing countries protects firms' assets. How can we capture this intuitive idea that what firms make and how they make it affects their appropriation risk? And under what conditions would we expect firms to rely on a technology gap as a risk-mitigating strategy? This paper makes three main arguments: First, production complexity is a key characteristic affecting firms’ relationship with governments. Second, production complexity can protect firms from appropriation by increasing the technical expertise bureaucrats need to appropriate. Third, bureaucratic capacity moderates the relationship between firms' production complexity and their appropriation risk. I test this theory using in-country interviews and firm-level panel data in Vietnam and China. This paper has three main findings. First, as production complexity increases, firms are appropriated from less. Second, a lack of bureaucratic capacity with respect to firms drives this relationship. Third, as production complexity increases, bureaucrats' efforts to appropriate increase. These findings suggest that bureaucrats and firms play a cat-and-mouse game, where production complexity makes firms a target for appropriation, while also decreasing how much is actually appropriated. This paper contributes to research on firm-level appropriation risk; firms’ risk-mitigating strategies; and the effect of firms' strategies on states' capacity.
“The Effect of Financial Products on Women’s Empowerment Among Women with Income.”
Invited to present in a Columbia graduate course, Causal Inference in International Political Economy.
Received Giancarlo Doria Prize, for best political science paper in the early years of PhD study at Columbia.
Abstract: Women having a source of income is considered a key pathway to increased female empowerment both privately and publicly. Income gives women resources that can be invested in political action; income also increases women’s intrahousehold bargaining power, and this private empowerment then increases their public empowerment. However, financial control over that income is vital for either of these pathways to lead to women’s empowerment, and is an assumption that is often overlooked in the literature. Given that women often do not retain control over their income, how might personal finance products affect women’s empowerment? This paper explores the effect of financial products on women’s empowerment among women with sources of income by examining alternate outcome measures from two experiments that provided women with financial products. I find that among women with sources of income, provision of financial products increases women’s public empowerment in terms of freedom of movement and access to information. Contrary to my expectations, financial products did not increase women’s inclusion in household spending decisions. This research contributes by combining two strands of literature: the effect of income on women’s empowerment and the effect of financial control on women’s empowerment.
“Cross-national Analysis of Production Complexity and Firms’ Appropriation Risk.”
“Production Complexity and Supply Chains of Multinational Firms.”
“How do firms talk about their production technology with governments?”
"Effect of Covid-era Manufacturing Automation on Firm-State Relations at the Provincial-level in Vietnam."
"Strategic Production Complexity among Firms as a Risk-Mitigating Strategy."