Michael J. Hiscox

BOOK:
Hiscox, Michael J. International Trade and Political Conflict: Commerce, Coalitions, and Mobility. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. This book provides a general study of political cleavages created by international trade. It addresses one of the oldest debates in political economy, that between class and group-based approaches to analysis, and provides a theoretical synthesis that indicates the conditions under which one approach is more appropriate than the other. It breaks new ground by presenting the first systematic evidence (both historical and cross-national) on levels of inter-industry factor mobility.

ARTICLES:
Hiscox, Michael J. Class versus Industry Cleavages: Inter-Industry Factor Mobility and the Politics of Trade, International Organization, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Winter, 2001): 1-46. Examines the extent to which conflict over trade has led to clashes between class coalitions in western democracies, and suggests that a good deal of this variation can be explained by the degree to which individual economic agents are mobile between industries. 

Hiscox, Michael J. Interindustry Factor Mobility and Technological Change: Evidence on Wage and Profit Dispersion across U.S. Industries, 1820 and 1990, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 62, No. 2 (June, 2002): 383-416. Reports the economic data on interindustry factor mobility for the United States since the 1820s and shows how the costs of re-locating capital and labor have been altered by technological changes associated with the different stages of industrialization. (Downloadable data).

Hiscox, Michael J. Commerce, Coalitions, and Factor Mobility: Evidence from Congressional Votes on Trade Legislation, American Political Science Review, Vol. 96, No. 3 (September, 2002): 593-608. Uses data on congressional roll-call votes on trade legislation between 1824 and 1994 to estimate the political effects of these changes in interindustry factor mobility.

Hiscox, Michael J. International Capital Mobility and Trade Politics: Capital Flows and Political Coalitions, Economics and Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (November, 2004): 253-285. Examines the implications for trade politics of varying degrees of international capital mobility, testing a formal model against data on flows of foreign direct investment and industry lobbying.

Hiscox, Michael J. Will Trade Be a Partisan Issue Again (and why isn’t it already)? Trade and the American Political Parties, Legislative Studies Quarterly, forthcoming, 2009. Notes that the current era of globalization has not generated the same level of partisanship in debates over trade that was evident in 1890s and early 1900s, and argues that the difference can be explained by long-term changes in the economy (including a general decline in levels of interindustry factor mobility in the manufacturing sector). 

RECENT PAPERS:
Hiscox, Michael J. Varieties of Capitalism: Birds of a Different Feather, or Not? Annual Review of Political Science, forthcoming, 2009. Reviews the collection of recent work in comparative political economy adhering to the "varieties of capitalism" framework, in which asset specificity is viewed as a function of institutions. 

Hainmueller, Jens and Michael J. Hiscox. Being Specific: Measuring Asset Specificity for Political Economy Version 8/1/08. We describe an ideal measure of specificity, and lay out a set of criteria by which alternative measures of specificity should be judged. We then survey and compare some of the most common measures of skill specificity applied in previous empirical research. We find that many measures represent radical departures from the theoretical concept and are severely limited in terms of the countries for which data are available.