On May 21 and 22, the scholars contributing to the forthcoming Tobin Project volume on The Corporation and American Democracy met in Cambridge to share their research findings and workshop drafts.
Recent News
In March, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article on the Tobin Project, titled "Tobin Project Coordinates 'Transformative Research' by Scholars and Policy Makers." The article offers a look at our mission and how we have brought together leading scholars and helped to generate high-impact strategic research.
Chapters from Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) were cited in a new report, "Dangerous Liaisons: Revolving Door at SEC Creates Risk of Regulatory Capture" by the Project on Government Oversight.
The Tobin Project seeks applications from doctoral students and law students undertaking work related to its initiatives in Democracy & Markets and National Security.
The deadline for applications is March 1, 2013.
In December, the Tobin Project convened an interdisciplinary group of over 30 top scholars, along with key policymakers, to explore how how the U.S. can sustainably pursue its national security interests when faced with a decade of costly foreign wars, a devastating global financial crisis, mounting public debt, and profound realignments in international political and economic power.
Core questions included:
On August 23, the Tobin Project hosted a workshop with a group of Tobin's National Security Scholars and the National Intelligence Council (NIC) to provide feedback on a draft version of the Global Trends 2030 report. The report will be published this winter and will outline the intelligence community’s predictions for international political, economic, and social trends that could affect the U.S.’s power and prosperity over next two decades.
In June, the International Centre for Financial Regulation (ICFR), a non-profit and non-partisan research organization based in London, published a report: “The Making of Good Financial Regulation: Toward a Policy Response to Regulatory Capture.” Recognizing the import of the Tobin Project’s forthcoming work on the issue, the ICFR asked the editors of Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It to contribute an essay to the report.
What has been the role of the corporation in the history of the American democracy? The Tobin Project has begun to gather a group of scholars to study this critical question. Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale, Economics and History) and Bill Novak (University of Michigan Law School) have signed on to lead this research effort and on May 16th convened an initial group of scholars for a Tobin Project workshop.
In May, the Tobin Project experimented with a new method of connecting policymakers and scholars by holding a virtual meeting between five policymakers— from the State Department, Defense Department, National Security Council, and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations—and Tobin Project national security scholars Stephen Van Evera (initiative chair), Jeremi Suri (initiative co-chair), and
Tobin Project graduate fellow Vincent Pons (MIT, Economics) has been featured in the New York Times, the Financial Times, Slate, and NBC for his elections research and work on François Hollande's presidential campaign in France. Along with Arthur Muller and Guillaume Liegey, two other French students who studied in the U.S., Vincent initiated a research project in 2010 to compare different voter registration interventions and their effectiveness in mobilizing unregistered voters to participate.
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At a 2011 meeting for authors of the Preventing Capture volume, Sabeel Rahman (Harvard Law School) discusses an idea with Richard Revesz (NYU Law School).