The William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance hosted a one-week program, "The Political Economy of Finance Summer School," from June 17 through 21. Rhodes Center Director Mark Blyth and Benjamin Braun of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance organized the program to train young political economists and build an intellectual community in an excitingly interdisciplinary field by connecting them with established leading scholars in finance. The program drew early-career scholars from 25 institutions representing 16 countries.
Rhodes Center Postdoctoral Research Associate Daniel Driscoll, a rising scholar in finance who attended the program, emphasized the "huge demand" for a program of this type. "This is like a Disneyland for a rising political economist," he said. "The kind of things that you can see and do, you just don't get at conferences or in departments."
The organizers noted that while finance is at the heart of capitalism's political economy, studying it can be difficult. And, "Because of the technical knowledge required, barriers of entry are high." Young scholars of finance outside of economics often lack the necessary depth of knowledge and don't have a community of colleagues in their disciplines with that expertise to help them.
The Rhodes summer school program was designed to help fill that gap by connecting these scholars with some of the brightest social scientists in the field, including Adam Goldstein, Benjamin Braun, Charlotte Robertson, Daniela Gabor, Gregor Semieniuk, Iain Weaver, Irene Monasterolo, J.W. Mason, Lenore Palladino, Mona Ali and Quentin Bruneau.
The intensive program featured two days of Ph.D. student workshops on various topics, including "finance and the non-financial economy," "finance and the state" and "finance and decarbonization." This was followed by two days of workshops for early career researchers, with topics that included "capitalist development and financing regimes" and "fault lines in financial capitalism."
Co-organizer Blyth said the program succeeded in its goal of giving "an overview of the hot areas of current research in the political economy of finance. For example, the role of asset managers and private equity firms in investment, investment regime across time and space, and the role of finance in decarbonization." "We tied these overviews by leading practitioners that we invited to Brown with skills sessions on handling large data sets," said Blyth. "It went very well in part because it was quite unique."
Commenting on what made the summer school unique, Blyth said, "There are any number of courses in the technical aspects of finance that one can take at many universities. We are trying to bring scholars from fields where finance has not been a central area of study, such as political science or geography, to a level of fluency with current work such that they can begin to engage with that work directly."
Blyth said Rhodes will host the summer school again next year and seek funding to run it annually.