Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Aug 27

Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs is hiring to fill the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies—a full professor (/of practice) level position that comes with directorship of the Saltzman Institute. Please apply!

Arnold A. Saltzman Professor in War and Peace Studies - New York City, New York (US) job with Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs | 37876354

The School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in the City of New York invites applications from scholars and practitioners ...

jobs.chronicle.com

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Aug 24

Something political science would benefit bigly from: World Politics style multi-book review articles where none of the books are written by political scientists. For example: one on “zones” featuring @atossaaraxia.bsky.social, Slobodian, etc. Let’s bring new stuff into the field!

Benjamin Braun @benbraun.bsky.social · Aug 23

I hyped the first two books before but reading all three together is the way to go. There’s a bit of corporate fluff here and there but that pales in comparison with the gains. One learns things about global political economy that one just doesn’t get from academic articles and books.

Covers of three Audiobooks:
House of Huawei, by Eva Dou
Apple in China, Patrick McGee
Chip War, Chris Miller

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Aug 8

Emailing all of my coauthors asking: “do you consider us to be *close* coauthors, or just normal ones?”

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Aug 4

Congrats Clint! Very cool!

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Rohan Mukherjee @rohanmukherjee.bsky.social · Aug 4

Academic job alert: The International Relations department at LSE is looking to hire two assistant professors, in international security and in IPE (climate, environment, global business). App deadline: 7th Sep 2025. Details👇

jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

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Kim Weeden @weedenkim.bsky.social · Jul 30

So, Columbia paid out $221M so that the Trump administration would resume payments on $400M in existing grants (i.e., signed work contracts) and so that Columbia could compete for future HHS/NIH awards.

Lucy didn't even wait a week before pulling up the football.

Liz Essley Whyte @lizessleywhyte.bsky.social · Jul 29

NEW
The White House is blocking the NIH from awarding new research grants for the rest of the fiscal year

Chokes off billions in research funding

Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol... with @nidhisubs.bsky.social

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding

The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

www.wsj.com

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jul 24

A very worthwhile read from my colleague, Suresh Naidu. We are between a rock and a hard place, and it’s not particularly helpful to pretend that contracting with Trump settles anything.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

www.nytimes.com

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jul 2

My vacation rental has Why Nations Fail on the bookshelf, cementing its status as beach reading.

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the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) @merovingians.bsky.social · Jun 21

the single image every genuinely freedom-loving american has been waiting for

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 21

Wondering if I should infer that the mild ones are your go-to (hence running low) or that you keep them around in the event of a low spice tolerance visitor…

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Matt Malis @mattmalis.bsky.social · Jun 17

New working paper!

with @calvin-thrall.bsky.social and David Lindsey, we collect the largest existing dataset on diplomatic personnel, and use it to analyze gender disparities in U.S. Foreign Service assignments

draft here: mattmalis.github.io/files/pdf/LM...

🧵 below

abstract: "Representation Without Influence: Evidence from Gender
Disparities in the U.S. Foreign Service"

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

Congrats again, Reilly, such great news for us. And I believe that, as an *associate* professor, academic tradition dictates that beers are on you from now on 😌

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

Tons more stuff in the paper. Please check it out (www.calvinthrall.com/assets/chamb...) - comments very welcome!

www.calvinthrall.com

Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

Using this data, I show that—as predicted—in cities with low levels of industrial diversification, dominant industries are *less likely* to join the local chamber. When diversification is high, chambers are much more representative of their local economies.

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

To test the mechanism, I scrape full membership directories for 20 local chambers. Comparing member counts to admin data on the total number of enterprises per city suggests an average membership rate of 15%—MASSIVE compared to most civil orgs. Local business is very organized!

Table 3: Local Chamber Membership Rates in Twenty Selected Municipalities.
Municipality

Chamber Members Establishments in City Membership Rate

Ann Arbor, MI
838
4827
0.17
Aurora, IL
603
3914
0.15
Bakersfield, CA
1022
10667
0.10
Billings, MT
938
5430
0.17
Boulder, CO
1210
6652
0.18
Bowling Green, KY
1829
2849
0.64
Chandler, AZ
1215
7496
0.16
Greensboro, NC
1315
9634
0.14
Lubbock, TX
1765
7325
0.24
Memphis, TN
1669
14751
0.11
Oakland, CA
824
10210
0.08
Omaha, NE
2530
16304
0.16
Portland, OR
2092
32149
0.07
Providence, RI
954
5788
0.16
Rochester, NY
1370
11592
0.12
Salt Lake City, UT
1408
18066
0.08
San Antonio, TX
1492
36704
0.04
Tacoma, WA
1373
8048
0.17
Tampa, FL
1090
29498
0.04
Tulsa, OK
1589
14341
0.11
Average:
1356
12812
0.15

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

TLDR: using a novel shift-share instrument, I show industrial diversification is a strong predictor of both municipal and county chamber formation during the 1970-2015 period. Lots of robustness stuff too (check out the paper).

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

To test the theory, I collect novel data on 11,000+ past and present local chambers in the U.S. from state corporate registries (thanks to @opencorporates.bsky.social ). I show that the number of U.S. municipalities and counties with their own chamber sharply increased over the 20th c.

Figure 2: The number of U.S. municipalities and counties with local chambers of commerce has increased sharply since 1947.

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

I theorize that this makes local level business organization more favorable: when firms’ industry competitors are more geographically dispersed, any locally-specific policy benefits will accrue mainly to them and not to their competitors in other cities.

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

I argue that the answer lies in the changing industrial makeup of U.S. localities over the 20th c. Gone are the days of the “industry town”—instead, the average U.S. county is home to a more diverse range of industries than ever before.

Figure 1: County-level industrial specialization has been in decline since 1947.
(a) Average county-level industrial specialization, 1947-2015. The vertical line separates the "early" CBP series from the modern series.

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 5

🚨 New working paper 🚨

In an era of political nationalization, here’s something interesting: locally organized business interest groups—eg “chambers of commerce”—are more popular than ever. Why is that?

Industrial Diversification and the Rise of the Local
Chamber*
Calvin Thrall
June 04, 2025
Abstract
Despite the well-documented nationalization of local politics over the late 20th century, one type of local organization has flourished: the chamber of commerce. Local chambers, influential interest groups in which firms operating in a given municipality band together to lobby for improved local business conditions, are now present in over 6,700 municipalities across nearly 2,300 counties. Why has the private sector been so successful at organizing locally, despite the costs inherent in collective ac-tion? I argue that industrial diversification at the local level makes chamber formation more likely; when firms are co-located with complementary industries rather than direct competitors, lobbying for geographically-specific ("place-based") benefits offers greater relative gains. I provide evidence in support of this explanation using new data on thousands of local chambers incorporated between 1970 and 2018, an identification strategy based on a novel Bartik-style shift-share instrument, and member-level data for twenty individual chambers. The results demonstrate how broader patterns of structural economic change have affected interest representation at the local level.

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Federica Genovese @fgenovese.bsky.social · Jun 3

🚨 WP w/ @acalacino.bsky.social & @hayleypring.bsky.social

It’s been a turbulent decade of globalization backlash. Populist projects wanna take back control everywhere.

Focusing on the case of oil and Brexit, we offer a story of the danger of this narrative and concrete merits of multilateralism: 🧵

Abstract of "Offshore Outlaws: Brexit and Oil Spills in the North Sea" by Anthony Calacino, Federica Genovese, Hayley Pring (University of Oxford)

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · Jun 3

Nice! Would be cool to contrast with the rise of executive intl agreements (see eg scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scho...)

"Presidential Control Over International Law" by Curtis A. Bradley and Jack L. Goldsmith

Presidents have come to dominate the making, interpretation, and termination of international law for the United States. Often without specific congressional concurrence, and sometimes even when it is...

scholarship.law.duke.edu

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Fatih Kansoy @fatih.ai · Jun 2

📢 [New Research] 📢 We tracked EVERY S&P 500 company's reaction to Fed announcements for 20 years

The Paris Climate Agreement didn't just change environmental policy—it completely flipped how Wall Street prices sustainability during rate hikes.

From -28.5bp penalty to +64.5bp protection 📈🧵

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Reposted by Calvin Thrall

Minju Kim @minjulisettekim.bsky.social · May 8

My ambassador paper with Shu Fu is out in @worldpolitics.bsky.social!

Ambassadors promote domestic exports to a host country and represent the interests of their home country at large. However, are trade benefits equally distributed domestically? 🧵
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

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Calvin Thrall @calvin-thrall.bsky.social · May 6

At this point, the primary value of interviewing Trump appointees seems to be documenting the administration’s lies for posterity.

Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · May 6

Read this excerpt of an interview with Jay Bhattacharya, new NIH director.

And do not miss the last graf.

Via @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social

www.science.org/content/arti...

On a Nature news article reporting that NIH planned to suspend subawards for foreign collaborations:
"No, that's false. There's going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money's going."
"I'm really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you're like, actually spreading rumors that you don't know anything about. ... Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that's not true."
"We're working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn't be reporting rumors. I know there's leaks all over here, but the leaks don't actually reflect what's happening.
Don't write about rumors. It actually makes the things that you and I care about worse.
Like it spreads panic."
Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.