Stephen Haber

Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse

A large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy. Extant cross-country regressions, however, assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions. Because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable, this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships. Numerous sources of bias may be driving the results, the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country-specific and time-invariant heterogeneity. To address these problems, we develop unique historical datasets, employ time-series centric techniques, and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals. We test to see if there is a long-run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time, both on a country-by-country basis and across several different panels. We find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism. In fact, in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing.

Industrial Concentration and the Capital Markets: A Comparative Study of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, 1830–1930

This article examines the relationship between capital market development and industrial structure during the early stages of industrialization, contrasting the experiences of Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. It argues that constraints placed on the formation of credit intermediaries in Latin America by poorly defined property rights and government regulatory policies produced greater concentration in the Mexican and Brazilian cotton textile industries than that which developed in the United States.

Related Lending and Economic Performance: Evidence from Mexico

Related lending, a widespread practice in LDCs, is widely held to encourage bankers to loot their banks at the expense of minority shareholders and depositors. We argue that neither looting nor credit misallocation are necessary outcomes of related lending. On the contrary, related lending often exists as a response to high information and contract-enforcement costs. Whether it encourages looting depends on other institutions, particularly those that create incentives to monitor directors. We examine Mexicos banking system, 1888–1913, in which there was widespread related lending. We find little evidence of credit misallocation, despite a financial crisis and government-organized rescue.

When the Law Does Not Matter: The Rise and Decline of the Mexican Oil Industry

Changes in formal institutions do not always affect economic outcomes. When an industry has specific technological features that limit a governments ability to expropriate it, or when the industry is able to call on foreign governments to enforce its de facto property rights, economic agents can easily mitigate changes in formal institutions designed to reduce these property rights. We explore the Mexican oil industry from 1911 to 1929 and demonstrate that informal rather than formal institutions were key, permitting oil companies to coordinate their responses to increases in taxes or the redefinition of their de jure property rights.

Brothers under the Skin: Diplomatic History and International Relations

T h e disciplines of history and political science have drifted apart. The epistemological differences that have always separated these two fields of study have become greater, but the contrasts are more marked in some areas than in others. Historians who study diplomatic history and political scientists who study international politics, despite some genuine differences, have always been engaged in a similar enterprise. Both have always been committed to a positivistic methodology in which claims have had to be supported by empirical data. In many other areas of study in history-areas that have grown in prominence-the relationship between argument and data has become increasingly attenuated. What is most notable about diplomatic history and international relations theory are not their differences, but their similarities with regard to subject matter and, in the end, commitment to objective evidence. The extent to which diplomatic history has been marginalized within the larger study of history is perhaps most remarkable. As the discipline of history has expanded its range of inquiry, an almost precisely complementary diminution of a sense of shared enterprise, or, in the customary jargon, a fragmentation of paradigms, has occurred. Traditional subjects-diplomatic history not the least-have been crowded out by the sheer volume of work in the broad new fields collectively known as ”social history.” In political science departments, international politics is still a major area of concern; in many history departments, the study of diplomatic history has virtually disappeared.

Assessing the Obstacles to Industrialisation: The Mexican Economy, 1830–1940 *

After England began what came to be known as the First Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, industrial technology quickly diffused throughout the nations of the North Atlantic. Within fifty years of the first rumblings of British industrialisation, the factory system had spread to Western Europe and the United States. Latin America, however, lagged behind. It was not until the twentieth century that manufacturing came to lead the economies of Latin America and that agrarian societies were transformed into industrial societies. This article seeks to understand this long lag in Latin American industrialisation through an analysis of the experience of Mexico during the period 8 30-1940. The purpose of the paper is to look at the obstacles that prevented self-sustaining industrialisation from taking place in Mexico, as well as to assess the results of the industrialisation that did

The Rate of Growth of Productivity in Mexico, 1850–1933: Evidence from the Cotton Textile Industry

This article employs previously unused data sources and techniques in order to estimate labour productivity and total factor productivity in the Mexican cotton textile industry over the period 1850–1933. Our findings indicate: (1) substantial productivity growth prior to the Porfiriato; (2) rapid productivity growth throughout the Porfiriato; (3) a swift, though incomplete, recovery from the Revolution during the 1920s; and, (4) an insignificant impact on productivity from the Great Depression. We also find evidence that the large, joint stock, limited liability firms that were founded during the Porfiriato had higher levels of total factor productivity than privately owned firms, but only for a short period of time, which suggests that these firms might have been sub-optimally large. Our results also indicate that labour markets in Porfirian Mexico were efficient. This suggests that manufacturers may not have had the monopsony power in labour markets that the literature indicates.

An Empirical Examination of Patent Hold-Up

A large theoretical literature asserts that standard-essential patents (SEPs) allow their owners to “hold up” innovation by charging fees that exceed their incremental contribution to a final product. We evaluate two central, interrelated predictions of this SEP holdup hypothesis: (1) SEP-reliant industries should experience more stagnant quality-adjusted prices than non-SEP-reliant industries; and (2) court decisions that reduce the excessive power of SEP holders should accelerate innovation in SEP-reliant industries. We find no empirical support for either prediction. Indeed, SEP-reliant industries have the fastest quality-adjusted price declines in the U.S. economy.

Political Instability and Economic Performance: Evidence from Revolutionary Mexico

What is the relationship between political instability and economic growth? This article examines this question using insights from the new institutional economics applied to a canonical case: revolutionary Mexico. The authors argue that investment and growth during and after the revolution were less affected by political instability than one might predict based on the extant theoretical and empirical literature. They find that while investor expectations, output, and productivity were sensitive to the interdiction of factor and product markets during the years of intense revolutionary violence (1914-17), the periods of political instability before (1910-13) and afterward (1918-34) had relatively minor effects on investor confidence, investments in new plant and equipment, rates of entry and exit by firms, industrial structure, and productivity growth.

Business Enterprise and the Great Depression in Brazil: A Study of Profits and Losses in Textile Manufacturing

This article employs previously unused accounting data and manuscript censuses to determine the impact of the Great Depression on Brazils most important cotton textile manufacturers. It argues that the Great Depression, when viewed at the level of the individual business enterprise, had far more serious consequences than the previous literature, which relied on aggregate statistical data, suggests. The analysis presented here leads to the conclusion that Brazils major cotton firms were in serious trouble prior to the 1929 Crash and that they took longer to recover than most other studies of Brazilian industrialization have indicated.