Suresh Naidu
Biographic Data
| ID | 3628860 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Suresh Naidu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Suresh |
| FAMILY NAME | Naidu |
| SIGNATURE | NAIDU S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 388 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
“Be Serious!”: In Memoriam Herb Gintis
Herb Gintis, who left us in 2023, was a giant of left economics. He believed passionately in ideas and their power, especially in helping deliver a more just and desirable world. In a career spanning six decades, he asked the most profound questions about economics and its aims and possibilities, and inspired a generation of economists in turn. We here recount his work and our interactions with him. JEL Classification: A11, P00
Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the Twentieth Century
We present the first estimates of long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for samples that are representative of the full U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that ask about father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show a robust increase in mobility between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts, about half of w…
Political Language in Economics
Does academic writing in economics reflect the political orientation of economists? We use machine learning to measure partisanship in academic economics articles. We predict the observed political behaviour of a subset of economists using phrases from their academic articles, show good out-of-sample predictive accuracy and then predict partisanship for all economists. We then use these predictions to examine patterns of political language in eco…
“Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and the Origins of U.S. Partisan Realignment
We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. We show that less-educated Americans differentially demand “predistribution” policies (e.g., a federal jobs guarantee, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while more-educated Americans differentially favor redistribution (taxes and transfers). This educational gradient in policy preferences has been largely unc…
Eudaimonic Jobs
John Ahlquist's essay proposes a notion of “decent jobs” that is multidimensional, context-dependent, and dynamic. I suggest a simple test for “decent work”: work that the worker thinks is valued by people whom the worker values (a measure of exemplary virtue, hence eudaimonic). High pay in a cash society is but one such signal of value, and much labor is provided without that signal. I advocate making relationship-building, decision-making, and …
An Overview of US Workers' Current Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions
American workers are currently engaged in an upsurge in collective actions aimed at achieving a stronger voice and representation at work; this desire for increased voice at work is also evident in survey data. However, union organizing drives in the United States typically meet with strong employer resistance, and such resistance reduces the likelihood that the organizing effort will be successful. In addition to unions, a broad array of other e…
Labor Monopsony and the Limits of the Law
Recent literature has suggested that antitrust regulation is an appropriate response to labor market monopsony. This article qualifies the primacy of antitrust by arguing that a significant degree of labor market power is "frictional," that is, without artificial barriers to entry or excessive concentration of employment. If monopsony is pervasive under conditions of laissez-faire, antitrust is likely to play only a partial role in remedying it, …
If You Don’t Like Your Job, Can You Always Quit? Pervasive Monopsony Power and Freedom in the Labor Market
One common metric of monopsony power is the quit elasticity, measuring how much more likely a worker is to quit a job in response to a wage change. Experimental and quasi-experimental variation in wages across workers within a given job results in quit elasticities in the 2-3 range, implying that a 10% reduction in wages increases the probability of quitting by 20-30%. In a model with monopsonistic employers, a quit elasticity of 2-3 also implies…
Is There Any Future for a US Labor Movement
A recent flurry of labor movement activity has been driven by younger workers, tight labor markets, and a sympathetic federal government. Nonetheless, US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular. This is because employer opposition and US labor law together imply that workers need to overcome substantial collective action problems at work in order to win union recognition and collective bargaining agreements. These barriers make d…
Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past 100 years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality. We document dramatic change…
Schooled by Strikes? The Effects of Large-Scale Labor Unrest on Mass Attitudes toward the Labor Movement
Strikes are a central tool of organized labor, yet existing research has focused on the economic consequences of strikes, rather than their political effects. We examine how labor actions by teachers, a well-organized group of public sector workers, affect mass attitudes about the strikes and interest in the labor movement more generally. Our context involves large-scale teacher strikes and walkouts in six states in 2018. Using an original survey…
Social Origins of Dictatorships: Elite Networks and Political Transitions in Haiti
Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that elites mount actions like coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. However, existing theory has been largely silent on the role of elite social networks, which interact with economic incentives and may facilitate antidemocratic collective action. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the effort an elite puts into a coup is increas…
Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power
Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets like in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem and private litigation has been rare and mostly unsuccessful. The reason is that the analytic methods for evaluating labor market power in antitrust contexts are p…
Democracy Does Cause Growth
We provide evidence that democracy has a positive effect on GDP per capita. Our dynamic panel strategy controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise confound the effect of democracy. To reduce measurement error, we introduce a new indicator of democracy that consolidates previous measures. Our baseline results show that democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20 percent in the long run. We find similar…
Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past hundred years.But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973.We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality.We document dramatic chang…
Collective Action and Customer Service in Retail
This article examines the relationship between workplace collective action at a large retail employer and customers' perceptions of service. The authors show that increases in workplace collective action, as measured by signed labor organization membership cards, are associated with lower customer ratings of service, as measured by Yelp reviews. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 80 workers, the authors discuss several possible explanations f…
A Political Economy Take on W / Y
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty,…
Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates
By exploiting a reform in the United Arab Emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions, we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers. Our results show that the reform increased incumbent migrants' earnings and firm retention. This occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits. While the outcomes of incumbents improved, the reform decreased demand for new …
Start-up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland
Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even conditional on total wealth and human capital, and this advantage disappears after emancipation. We assess a number of potential explanations, and find sugg…
Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China
Bases, Bullets, and Ballots: The Effect of US Military Aid on Political Conflict in Colombia
Does foreign military assistance strengthen or further weaken fragile states facing internal confict? We address this question by estimating how U.S. military aid affects violence and electoral participation in Colombia. We exploit the allocation of U.S. military aid to Colombian military bases, and compare how aid affects municipalities with and without bases. Using detailed political violence data, we find that U.S. military aid leads to differ…
When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South
In the American South, postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and in…
Economic Determinants of Land Invasions
This study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict. We examine land invasions in Brazil using a panel data set with over 50,000 municipality-year observations. Adverse economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall, cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings. This effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems, but not by other observable variables. In highly unequa…
The Economic Effects of a Citywide Minimum Wage
This paper presents the first study of the economic effects of a citywide minimum wage-San Francisco's adoption of an indexed minimum wage, set at $8.50 in 2004 and $9.14 by 2007. Compared to earlier benchmark studies by Card and Krueger and by Neumark and Wascher, this study surveys table-service as well as fast-food restaurants, includes more control groups, and collects data for more outcomes. The authors find that the policy increased worker …
Democracy Does Cause Growth
We provide evidence that democracy has a positive effect on GDP per capita. Our dynamic panel strategy controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise confound the effect of democracy. To reduce measurement error, we introduce a new indicator of democracy that consolidates previous measures. Our baseline results show that democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20 percent in the long run. We find similar…
Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past hundred years.But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973.We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality.We document dramatic chang…
Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates
By exploiting a reform in the United Arab Emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions, we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers. Our results show that the reform increased incumbent migrants' earnings and firm retention. This occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits. While the outcomes of incumbents improved, the reform decreased demand for new …
Bases, Bullets, and Ballots: The Effect of US Military Aid on Political Conflict in Colombia
Does foreign military assistance strengthen or further weaken fragile states facing internal confict? We address this question by estimating how U.S. military aid affects violence and electoral participation in Colombia. We exploit the allocation of U.S. military aid to Colombian military bases, and compare how aid affects municipalities with and without bases. Using detailed political violence data, we find that U.S. military aid leads to differ…
Schooled by Strikes? The Effects of Large-Scale Labor Unrest on Mass Attitudes toward the Labor Movement
Strikes are a central tool of organized labor, yet existing research has focused on the economic consequences of strikes, rather than their political effects. We examine how labor actions by teachers, a well-organized group of public sector workers, affect mass attitudes about the strikes and interest in the labor movement more generally. Our context involves large-scale teacher strikes and walkouts in six states in 2018. Using an original survey…
Social Origins of Dictatorships: Elite Networks and Political Transitions in Haiti
Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that elites mount actions like coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. However, existing theory has been largely silent on the role of elite social networks, which interact with economic incentives and may facilitate antidemocratic collective action. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the effort an elite puts into a coup is increas…
The Economic Effects of a Citywide Minimum Wage
This paper presents the first study of the economic effects of a citywide minimum wage-San Francisco's adoption of an indexed minimum wage, set at $8.50 in 2004 and $9.14 by 2007. Compared to earlier benchmark studies by Card and Krueger and by Neumark and Wascher, this study surveys table-service as well as fast-food restaurants, includes more control groups, and collects data for more outcomes. The authors find that the policy increased worker …
An Overview of US Workers' Current Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions
American workers are currently engaged in an upsurge in collective actions aimed at achieving a stronger voice and representation at work; this desire for increased voice at work is also evident in survey data. However, union organizing drives in the United States typically meet with strong employer resistance, and such resistance reduces the likelihood that the organizing effort will be successful. In addition to unions, a broad array of other e…
Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China
Start-up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland
Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even conditional on total wealth and human capital, and this advantage disappears after emancipation. We assess a number of potential explanations, and find sugg…
Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the Twentieth Century
We present the first estimates of long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for samples that are representative of the full U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that ask about father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show a robust increase in mobility between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts, about half of w…
Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power
Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets like in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem and private litigation has been rare and mostly unsuccessful. The reason is that the analytic methods for evaluating labor market power in antitrust contexts are p…
Political Language in Economics
Does academic writing in economics reflect the political orientation of economists? We use machine learning to measure partisanship in academic economics articles. We predict the observed political behaviour of a subset of economists using phrases from their academic articles, show good out-of-sample predictive accuracy and then predict partisanship for all economists. We then use these predictions to examine patterns of political language in eco…
Is There Any Future for a US Labor Movement
A recent flurry of labor movement activity has been driven by younger workers, tight labor markets, and a sympathetic federal government. Nonetheless, US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular. This is because employer opposition and US labor law together imply that workers need to overcome substantial collective action problems at work in order to win union recognition and collective bargaining agreements. These barriers make d…
Collective Action and Customer Service in Retail
This article examines the relationship between workplace collective action at a large retail employer and customers' perceptions of service. The authors show that increases in workplace collective action, as measured by signed labor organization membership cards, are associated with lower customer ratings of service, as measured by Yelp reviews. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 80 workers, the authors discuss several possible explanations f…
The Economic Effects of a Citywide Minimum Wage
This paper presents the first study of the economic effects of a citywide minimum wage-San Francisco's adoption of an indexed minimum wage, set at $8.50 in 2004 and $9.14 by 2007. Compared to earlier benchmark studies by Card and Krueger and by Neumark and Wascher, this study surveys table-service as well as fast-food restaurants, includes more control groups, and collects data for more outcomes. The authors find that the policy increased worker …
Economic Determinants of Land Invasions
This study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict. We examine land invasions in Brazil using a panel data set with over 50,000 municipality-year observations. Adverse economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall, cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings. This effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems, but not by other observable variables. In highly unequa…
When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South
In the American South, postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and in…
Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China
Bases, Bullets, and Ballots: The Effect of US Military Aid on Political Conflict in Colombia
Does foreign military assistance strengthen or further weaken fragile states facing internal confict? We address this question by estimating how U.S. military aid affects violence and electoral participation in Colombia. We exploit the allocation of U.S. military aid to Colombian military bases, and compare how aid affects municipalities with and without bases. Using detailed political violence data, we find that U.S. military aid leads to differ…
Monopsony Power in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates
By exploiting a reform in the United Arab Emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions, we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers. Our results show that the reform increased incumbent migrants' earnings and firm retention. This occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits. While the outcomes of incumbents improved, the reform decreased demand for new …
Start-up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland
Slave property rights yielded a source of collateral as well as a coerced labor force. Using data from Dun and Bradstreet linked to the 1860 census and slave schedules in Maryland, we find that slaveowners were more likely to start businesses prior to the uncompensated 1864 emancipation, even conditional on total wealth and human capital, and this advantage disappears after emancipation. We assess a number of potential explanations, and find sugg…
A Political Economy Take on W / Y
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty,…
Antitrust Remedies for Labor Market Power
Recent research indicates that labor market power has contributed to wage inequality and economic stagnation. Although the antitrust laws prohibit firms from restricting competition in labor markets like in product markets, the government does little to address the labor market problem and private litigation has been rare and mostly unsuccessful. The reason is that the analytic methods for evaluating labor market power in antitrust contexts are p…
Democracy Does Cause Growth
We provide evidence that democracy has a positive effect on GDP per capita. Our dynamic panel strategy controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise confound the effect of democracy. To reduce measurement error, we introduce a new indicator of democracy that consolidates previous measures. Our baseline results show that democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20 percent in the long run. We find similar…
Unions and Inequality Over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past hundred years.But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973.We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality.We document dramatic chang…
Collective Action and Customer Service in Retail
This article examines the relationship between workplace collective action at a large retail employer and customers' perceptions of service. The authors show that increases in workplace collective action, as measured by signed labor organization membership cards, are associated with lower customer ratings of service, as measured by Yelp reviews. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 80 workers, the authors discuss several possible explanations f…
Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data
U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past 100 years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality. We document dramatic change…
Schooled by Strikes? The Effects of Large-Scale Labor Unrest on Mass Attitudes toward the Labor Movement
Strikes are a central tool of organized labor, yet existing research has focused on the economic consequences of strikes, rather than their political effects. We examine how labor actions by teachers, a well-organized group of public sector workers, affect mass attitudes about the strikes and interest in the labor movement more generally. Our context involves large-scale teacher strikes and walkouts in six states in 2018. Using an original survey…
Social Origins of Dictatorships: Elite Networks and Political Transitions in Haiti
Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that elites mount actions like coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests. However, existing theory has been largely silent on the role of elite social networks, which interact with economic incentives and may facilitate antidemocratic collective action. We develop a model where coups generate rents for elites and show that the effort an elite puts into a coup is increas…
Labor Monopsony and the Limits of the Law
Recent literature has suggested that antitrust regulation is an appropriate response to labor market monopsony. This article qualifies the primacy of antitrust by arguing that a significant degree of labor market power is "frictional," that is, without artificial barriers to entry or excessive concentration of employment. If monopsony is pervasive under conditions of laissez-faire, antitrust is likely to play only a partial role in remedying it, …
If You Don’t Like Your Job, Can You Always Quit? Pervasive Monopsony Power and Freedom in the Labor Market
One common metric of monopsony power is the quit elasticity, measuring how much more likely a worker is to quit a job in response to a wage change. Experimental and quasi-experimental variation in wages across workers within a given job results in quit elasticities in the 2-3 range, implying that a 10% reduction in wages increases the probability of quitting by 20-30%. In a model with monopsonistic employers, a quit elasticity of 2-3 also implies…
Is There Any Future for a US Labor Movement
A recent flurry of labor movement activity has been driven by younger workers, tight labor markets, and a sympathetic federal government. Nonetheless, US union density remains low, even as unions remain popular. This is because employer opposition and US labor law together imply that workers need to overcome substantial collective action problems at work in order to win union recognition and collective bargaining agreements. These barriers make d…
“Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and the Origins of U.S. Partisan Realignment
We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. We show that less-educated Americans differentially demand “predistribution” policies (e.g., a federal jobs guarantee, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while more-educated Americans differentially favor redistribution (taxes and transfers). This educational gradient in policy preferences has been largely unc…
Eudaimonic Jobs
John Ahlquist's essay proposes a notion of “decent jobs” that is multidimensional, context-dependent, and dynamic. I suggest a simple test for “decent work”: work that the worker thinks is valued by people whom the worker values (a measure of exemplary virtue, hence eudaimonic). High pay in a cash society is but one such signal of value, and much labor is provided without that signal. I advocate making relationship-building, decision-making, and …
An Overview of US Workers' Current Organizing Efforts and Collective Actions
American workers are currently engaged in an upsurge in collective actions aimed at achieving a stronger voice and representation at work; this desire for increased voice at work is also evident in survey data. However, union organizing drives in the United States typically meet with strong employer resistance, and such resistance reduces the likelihood that the organizing effort will be successful. In addition to unions, a broad array of other e…
“Be Serious!”: In Memoriam Herb Gintis
Herb Gintis, who left us in 2023, was a giant of left economics. He believed passionately in ideas and their power, especially in helping deliver a more just and desirable world. In a career spanning six decades, he asked the most profound questions about economics and its aims and possibilities, and inspired a generation of economists in turn. We here recount his work and our interactions with him. JEL Classification: A11, P00
Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the Twentieth Century
We present the first estimates of long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for samples that are representative of the full U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that ask about father's occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show a robust increase in mobility between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts, about half of w…
Political Language in Economics
Does academic writing in economics reflect the political orientation of economists? We use machine learning to measure partisanship in academic economics articles. We predict the observed political behaviour of a subset of economists using phrases from their academic articles, show good out-of-sample predictive accuracy and then predict partisanship for all economists. We then use these predictions to examine patterns of political language in eco…
Economics (20 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Demographic economics (8 works) · Labour economics (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (6 works) · Law (6 works)