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Why has US commercial policy become increasingly politicized in the twenty-first century? We argue that this politicization reflects an interaction between elite rhetoric on unfair trade practices and American meritocratic values. As the twenty-first century progressed, elites increasingly argued that economic malaise was a result of predatory practices by US trading partners. This "trade is unfair" rhetoric resonated most strongly with meritocratic Americans: individuals who believed in principles of market fairness but also worried about future economic prospects. To evaluate the argument that trade policy frames resonate differently among Americans, we draw on data from several survey experiments as well as a large, original panel data set with repeat observations of the same individuals. Individuals who are most tied to the myth of the classic American Dream are the most likely to respond to a frame blaming unfair trade for America's economic problems, and this contributes to rising antiglobalization sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media outlets provide crucial inputs into the democratic process, yet they face increasingly severe economic challenges. I study how a newly salient manifestation of this pressure, reduced reporting capacity, influences political coverage. Focusing on newspapers in the United States, where industry‐wide employment fell over 40% between 2007 and 2015, I use panel data to assess the relationship between reporting capacity and political coverage. Staff cuts substantially decrease the amount of political coverage newspapers provide. Across different samples and measurement approaches, a typical cutback to a newspaper's reporting staff reduces its annual political coverage by between 300 and 500 stories. These political news declines happen against the backdrop of similar reductions in nonpolitical coverage, meaning the share of newspaper articles focused on politics remains stable over this period. This demonstrates that economic pressure affects the political information environment by shaping the media's capacity to cover politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left‐digit bias. We show that unemployment figures crossing a round‐number "milestone" cause a discontinuous increase in the amount of media coverage devoted to unemployment conditions, and we use this discontinuity to estimate the effect of attention to unemployment news on voting, holding constant the actual economic conditions on the ground. Milestone effects on incumbent U.S. governor vote shares are large and notably asymmetric: Bad milestone events hurt roughly twice as much as good milestone events help. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal write about the century-long relationship between national income inequality and congressional partisan polarization: rising income inequality corresponds to more polarization. I question this relationship. First, income inequality correlates more strongly with Republican positioning than with polarization, even before Republicans moved asymmetrically rightward. Second, holding the Republican position fixed, leftward movement of congressional Democrats corresponds to decreasing inequality. Consistent with these empirical facts, I explore substantive evidence that (1) suggests that a Republican-centered explanation plausibly runs in either causal direction but (2) casts doubt on whether polarization driven by Democratic extremism contributes to or is fostered by rising income inequality. Given the prominence of McCarty et al.'s argument in scholarship and the commentary on American politics it informs, this observation is central for understanding how politics shapes and responds to income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a state's source of wealth condition the domain in which it seeks to project influence? We argue that what a state makes conditions what they take. Specifically, the less states rely on land rents to acquire wealth, the less interested they will be in seeking control over territory and the more interested they will be in securing access to distant markets. We develop and test several observable implications that should follow whether this proposition is true. First, as states become less economically dependent on territory, they should be less likely to fight over territory; second, those states should be more likely to both invest in power projection capabilities and subsequently project power at greater distances. Our findings support our theory. These results are robust across a variety of model specifications that take into account potential confounds, such as regime type, economic development, threat, and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and US congressional agendas. Longstanding insights into the influence of political spending on public policy suggest that money can narrow the scope of policy conflicts. I argue that rising inequality should intensify these negative-agenda forces as wealthy interests gain a political advantage relative to other social groups and use this advantage to protect their socioeconomic position by donating to candidates who pursue less disruptive agendas. The expectation is that economic inequality narrows the purview of policymaking and that this is manifest through a reduction in the diversity of the congressional agenda. Empirical analysis supports this position. Error-correction models show that rising inequality is associated with a reduction in the diversity of congressional hearings, bill introductions, and laws. Moreover, it is legislators who are heavily dependent on deep-pocketed donors and political action committees that engage with a narrower range of policy topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do political factors affect foreign aid allocation? Recognizing that aid can be used as inducement, we argue that the US has incentives to provide aid to countries who oppose it a priori at the United Nations General Assembly when it is the sole country that “buys votes” with aid, in order to maximize the number of favorable votes. When there is a rival country trying to buy votes, as was the case during the Cold War, there are incentives for the US to provide aid even to those who support its position already. We empirically demonstrate that the US provides more aid to countries who hold unfavorable positions to the US only in the post-Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the consequences of economic downturns for states’ redistributive politics. We track state policies from 1980 through 2010 and illustrate how economic downturns led states to adopt budget-balancing policies by suppressing both the increased spending on programs benefiting the poor otherwise expected under Democratic Party control and the tax cuts for the wealthy otherwise expected under Republican Party control. We also undertake a natural experiment case study—comparing the forty Democratic and Republican governors in office right before (2007–2008) and after (2009–2010) the onset of the Great Recession. We find that Republican governors were less likely to propose spending and increased calls for spending cuts; yet, no similar shift in tax proposals was evident with continued calls for tax cuts to the wealthy. Democratic governors exhibited a similar pattern, but were less responsive and more likely to maintain their earlier policy proposals even after a significant downturn in the national economy. Together, these findings highlight how economic and political conditions interact with one another to shape “who gets what, when, and how from government,” as well as clarify that we must ask and answer these questions separately for taxing and spending to capture the complex politics of redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Work on economic news argues that U.S. coverage focuses primarily on changes rather than levels of future economic conditions; it also both affects and reflects public economic sentiment. Given that economic perceptions are related to policy preferences and government support, this is of consequence for politics. This article explores the generalizability of these findings. Methods Using nearly 100,000 stories over 30 years in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, we compare media tone, public opinion, and economic conditions. Result Analyses demonstrate that media tone and public opinion follow future economic change in all three countries. Media and opinion are also related, but the effect mostly runs from the public to the media, not the other way around. Conclusion These results confirm the generalizability of prior findings, and the importance of considering more than a simple unidirectional link between media coverage and public economic sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores on the history of the U.S. including the political economy, foreign relations and the nation's infrastructure as well as the offshore commercial and military base. It highlights the importance of American community in order to recognize the Americans in the foreign territory. It also cites the rights, protections, and duties of U.S. law for the Americans citizens and residents in the country wherein the nation made treaties and alliances with the polities through internal migrations and negotiations.

Since its origins in the late 19th century, the most salient characteristics of the progressive state have been marginalism in economics, the geatly increased use of scientific theory and data in policy making, and the encouragement of broad electoral participation. All have served to make progressive policy less stable than classical and other more laissez-faire alternatives. However, the progressive state has also performed better than alternatives by every economic measure. One of the progressive state's biggest vulnerabilities is commonly said to be its susceptibility to special interest capture. The progressive state makes many decisions via either legislation or administrative agencies, and both are thought to be prone to special interest control at the expense of the public. Nevertheless, the superior economic performance of the progressive state calls that conclusion into question. How can a state policy that is so prone to special interest capture also produce superior results? One severe weakness of the capture argument against the progressive state is that it uses the free market as a baseline for identifying what is in the public interest. Under such a standard, any political theory that believes that market failure is more widespread and in need of correction will generate too many false positives suggesting capture. In fact, special interest capture often explains failures to regulate as much as special interest regulation itself, and today the former dominates the latter on many important issues. Ironically, one exacerbating factor in producing such capture is the structural features of the Constitution itself, which place much higher burdens on those seeking to regulate than on those seeking to resist regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using motivated reasoning, voters rely on partisanship as a heuristic for evaluating the economy in belief-preserving ways. Yet recent findings show that these motivations may be restricted by a range of contextual factors. We argue that partisan motivations in economic perceptions are moderated by the local economic context. As conditions worsen, a negative information environment leads in-partisans to political ambivalence that reduces confidence in party cues when evaluating the economy. As conditions improve, the motivation for in-partisans to rely on party cues is restored. As positive information has been shown to be less influential for opinion formation than negative information, and out-group members tend to be most prone to motivated reasoning, the economic context should moderate the political motivations of out-partisans to a lesser extent than in-partisans. A multilevel analysis of the 1980 to 2012 American National Election Studies supplemented with state-level data on unemployment and per capita disposable income supports this argument. The effects of in-party attachments on economic perceptions are diminished as economic conditions deteriorate and grow stronger as conditions improve. Moreover, the conditional effects of economic performance on subjective perceptions are stronger for in-partisans than for out-partisans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Economic inequality in the United States is extreme, but little is known about the national origin of affluent households. Households in the top one percent by total wealth own vastly disproportionate quantities of household assets and have correspondingly high levels of economic, social, and political influence. The overrepresentation of white natives (i.e., those born in the U.S.) among high-wealth households is well-documented, but changing migration dynamics suggest that a growing portion of top households may be immigrants. Methods: Because no single survey dataset contains top wealth holders and data about country of origin, this paper uses two publicly-available data sets: the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Multiple imputation is used to impute country of birth from the SIPP into the SCF. Descriptive statistics are used to demonstrate reliability of the method, to estimate the prevalence of immigrants among top wealth holders, and to document patterns of asset ownership among affluent immigrants. Results: Significant numbers of top wealth holders who are usually classified as white natives may be immigrants. Many top wealth holders appear to be European and Canadian immigrants, and increasing numbers of top wealth holders are likely from Asia and Latin America as well. Results suggest that of those in the top one percent of wealth holders, approximately 3% are European and Canadian immigrants, .5% are from Mexico or Cuban, and 1.7% are from Asia (especially Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and India). Ownership of key assets varies considerably across affluent immigrant groups. Conclusion: Although the percentage of top wealth holders who are immigrants is relatively small, these percentages represent large numbers of households with considerable resources and corresponding social and political influence. Evidence that the propensity to allocate wealth to real and financial assets varies across immigrant groups suggests that wealth ownership is more global than previous research suggests and that immigrant groups are likely to become more prevalent in top wealth positions in the U.S. As the representation of immigrants in top wealth positions grows, their economic, social, and political influence is likely to increase as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the international relations between the U.S. and the United Nations (UN) along with the engagement of the U.S. with the UN under the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Topics mentioned include the foreign policy priorities of Trump's administration, the financing of the UN climate-change mitigation by the U.S. government and the strong and productive relationship of the UN with President Trump, who is serious in his statements about solving global problem for the country's interests.

Contemporary debates on the relationship between migration and development focus extensively on how migrant remittances affect the economies of sending countries. Yet remittances also produce dynamic political consequences in migrants’ origin communities. Income earned abroad creates political opportunities for migrant groups to participate in the provision of public services in their hometowns. Focusing on organizational variation in partnerships across time and space, this article examines the conditions under which the transnational coproduction of public goods between organized migrants and public agencies at origin shapes democratic governance. I argue that local citizen inclusion and government engagement interact to determine four different types of coproduction: corporatist, fragmented, substitutive, and synergetic. Using four comparative case studies based on fieldwork in three Mexican states, I trace central mechanisms to organizational forms of coproduction and describe how emergent variation affects democratic governance and state–society relations. I show how transnational forces, when collaborating with local social and political institutions, can profoundly affect democratic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses subnational political power and innovations in America in relation to a question about whether state and local government interventions can help to advance U.S. civil rights laws and initiatives as of 2016. Community-benefits agreements (CBAs) and inclusionary zoning are addressed, along with economic inclusion and bans on source-of-income discrimination and credit history limitations. U.S. federal law and the nation's political economy are also assessed.

The current estate tax raises little revenue, yet is ill designed to further the social goals used to justify it. This Article takes one frequently mentioned goal--minimizing dynastic wealth transfers--and explores what insights focusing on that objective yields for the design of the transfer tax system. It starts from the premise that what renders dynastic wealth transfers problematic is that such transfers can bestow upon the recipient unearned political and economic power, which contravenes the democratic ideal that power should be earned, not inherited. Under this view, the tax system should be concerned with neither the build-up of wealth per se nor transfers of wealth that are not large enough to bestow power upon the recipient. Instead, the tax system should be concerned only with transfers of wealth large enough to confer economic and political power on the recipient. The structure that best reflects this concern is a progressive cumulative accessions tax that focuses on the recipient, instead of an estate tax that focuses on the transferor. Each recipient should have an extremely high exemption amount, given that receiving a few hundred thousand or couple million dollars does not give one power. Lastly, there should be no generation-skipping penalty, because what matters is how many individuals have the ability to use the power accompanying the wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of my career, I have navigated a research agenda that moves between scholarly and policy-oriented research. Building on this experience, I argue that it is time for law and society scholars to take seriously a commitment to engaged scholarship that speaks to a wider audience of stakeholders and policymakers. Three themes frame my proposal to get back in the game of advocacy and policy. First, I consider why we need to rekindle this commitment at this historical moment: inequalities in wealth, income, and social mobility and the rise of mass incarceration and its collateral consequences diminish the foundation required for effective democratic governance to thrive. Second, what our scholarship has to say is key to the framing of pragmatic policy: law and society's focus on law in action and the culture of law are key to understanding the ways in which most policies tend to deliver unintended consequences. Finally, we need to consider how to go about the next step to make our work visible to a wider audience of stakeholders? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do approaching elections affect the security policy states conduct? We build on classic political economy arguments and theorize that one problem likely faced by democratic policy makers near elections is that of time inconsistency. The time-inconsistency problem arises when the costs and benefits of policy are not realized at the same time. We develop an application of the argument to the case of allied troop contributions to Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan. In that case, we argue that the expectation should be one of fewer troops committed close to elections. The exogenous timing of elections allows us to identify the effects of approaching elections on troop levels. Our finding of significantly lower troop contributions near elections is arguably the first identified effect of electoral proximity on security policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will argue that in the administrative state, in contrast to classical constitutional theory, the abuse of government power is not something to be strictly minimized, but rather optimized. An administrative regime will tolerate a predictable level of misrule, even abuse of power, as the inevitable byproduct of attaining other ends that are desirable overall. There are three principal grounds for this claim. First, the architects of the modem administrative state were not only worried about misrule by governmental officials. They were equally worried about "private" misrule--misrule effected through the self-interested or self-serving behavior of economic actors wielding and abusing power under the rules of the 18th-century common law of property, tort, and contract. The administrative state thus trades off governmental and "private" misrule. Second, the rate of change in the policy environment, especially in the economy, is much greater than in the late 18th century--so much greater that the administrative state has been forced, willy-nilly, to speed up the rate of policy adjustment. The main speeding-up mechanism has been evergreater delegation to the executive branch, accepting the resulting risks of error and abuse. Third, the costs of enforcing legal rules against executive officials are necessarily positive and plausibly large, in part because any institutional monitors created to detect and punish abuses must themselves be monitored for abuse. The architects of the administrative state believed that a government that always forms undistorted judgments, and that never abuses its power, will do too little, do it too amateurishly, and do it too slowly. In that sense, the administrative state constantly gropes towards an institutional package solution that embodies an optimal level of abuse of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although they agree that economics and elections are intertwined, theories of economic voting disagree on the policy focus (on positions taken or outcomes achieved) and time horizon (retrospective or prospective) that guides voters’ decisions. Most research on these debates looks at the considerations voters weigh. Instead, I explore the types of economic voting that candidates encourage through their campaign appeals. Content-coded advertising data from the 2004 congressional elections show that appeals focus more on policy positions than outcomes and more on the past than the future. Consistent with predictions from emphasis allocation theory, strategic incentives and electoral context shape the exact mix of economic appeals campaigns make. When promoting their own candidacy, politicians ask voters to think about (more unifying) future economic outcomes; when attacking their opponent’s candidacy, they ask voters to think about (more divisive) past policy positions. In districts experiencing worsening economic conditions, voters are exposed to more information about policy outcomes; in districts where the incumbent is ideologically “out of step,” they hear more about policy positions. Studies that seek to evaluate competing theories of economic voting are thus likely to draw misleading conclusions if they treat the information environment as a homogeneous constant: Campaigns in different districts, facing different strategic incentives, encourage significantly different types of economic voting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the outset of the 2012 presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney touted his private sector leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As this election unfolded, Romney's Bain Capital story became less of a narrative he could run on and more of a narrative he had to run from. Why did this Bain Capital story, a story about someone's success in the free marketplace in a society that seemingly values such success, become so troubling for the Romney campaign? This question constitutes the centerpiece of the present essay. In addressing this question, we argue that the Bain Capital narrative's role in the 2012 presidential race divulges a great deal about the fundamental nature of economic discourse in American democracy. Specifically, we contend that the economic narratives circulating in American democracy actually construct a tale of two economies--a tangible economy and a speculative economy. Unfortunately for Romney, his Bain Capital narrative situated him on the wrong side of this economic divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of voting in undisputed, yet scholarly works attempting to understand the causes and consequences of incorrect voting are relatively scarce. Building on the works of Lau and Redlawsk (1997, 2006; Lau et al., 2008), I design and implement a new survey method measuring incorrect voting I call Self-identified Incorrect Voting (SIV). This method allows survey respondents to determine for themselves if they voted incorrectly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I conducted the SIV survey of a national sample of voters and use the results to test traditional hypotheses regarding the value of partisanship and the economy as cues to help low-information voters behave in the same manner as high-information voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voters increasingly view their consumer activities, not their campaign contributions, as the most meaningful way to participate in politics. In 2014, after it became public that Mozilla's CEO, Brendan Eich, had made a controversial political donation in a state ballot proposition, consumer pressure led to his resignation. Eich's downfall and the politicization of retail markets means that business leaders are unlikely to respond to McCutcheon v . FEC by embracing transparency with their campaign donations, and also suggests that campaign finance deregulation is causing hydraulic effects that the Supreme Court has failed to anticipate. This Essay explores what "economic reprisal" means for business leaders--a significant segment of the so-called "donor class"--when consumers vote at the cash register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both countries and subnational governments commonly engage in competition for mobile capital, offering generous incentives to attract investment. Existing economics research has suggested that these tax incentives have a limited ability to affect investment patterns and are often excessively costly when measured against the amount of investment and jobs created. In this paper, we argue instead that the 'competition' for capital can be politically beneficial to incumbent politicians. Building off work on electoral pandering, we argue that incentives allow politicians to take credit for firms' investment decisions. We test the empirical implications of this theory using a nationwide Internet survey, which employs a randomized experiment to test how voters evaluate the performance of incumbent US governors. Our findings illustrate a critical political benefit of offering such incentives. Politicians can use these incentives to take credit for investment flowing into their districts and to minimize the political fallout when investors choose to locate elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do historically contingent political accounts help explain the growth in family income inequality in the United States? We use time-series regressions based on 60 years to detect such relationships by assessing interactive associations between the neoliberal departure coincident with Ronald Reagan’s election and the acceleration in inequality that began soon after Reagan took office. We find evidence for this and for a second contingent relationship: stronger unions could successfully resist policies that enhanced economic inequality only before Reagan’s presidency and before the neoliberal anti-union administrations from both parties that followed Reagan. Politically inspired reductions in union membership, and labor’s diminished political opportunities during and after Reagan’s presidency, meant unions no longer could slow the growth in U.S. inequality. Coefficients on these two historically contingent interactions remain significant after many additional determinants are held constant. These findings indicate that political determinants should not be neglected when researchers investigate the determinants of U.S. inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of surveys and survey experiments by international political economy scholars is increasing, adding to the ability to study a broad array of topics. In doing so, many scholars in international political economy draw on—and are contributing to—insights and arguments from American politics and comparative politics (Milner 1998), substantive fields with a history of using surveys and survey experiments. In this article, I review motivations for using surveys and survey experiments, the research designs, and analysis strategies in light of this issue’s contributions. I contrast these motivations and their accompanying designs and discuss the pros and cons of ways to approach the data generated by these research designs. The goal of this commentary is to situate surveys and survey experiments—especially those within the special issue—within a larger discussion about research motivations, design, and analysis techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While economic globalization has altered the geography of international migration and introduced an array of new sources and destinations, our understanding of the specific mechanisms that link economic globalization to migration remains limited. In this article, I attempt to extend previous research by undertaking an empirical case study of Mexican migration to the USA. Using a unique dataset, I construct multivariate models to test whether, in the context of economic integration, occupations channel migration between similar sectors of the Mexican and US economies. I focus on the food-processing sector because of its role in the geographic dispersal of Mexican immigration. The results show a strong channelling of Mexican immigration along an occupational line linking the Mexican and US food-processing sectors. The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which ushered in a period of intensive political and economic integration, strengthened this occupational channel. By seeing the changing geography of Mexico-US migration in the context of economic globalization, this study casts light on the micro-level foundations of the globalization-migration nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's suffrage led to one of the greatest enfranchisements in history. Voting rights, however, were not won by force or threats thereof, a fact leading political economy theories find hard to explain. Studying the timing of suffrage extensions in US states between 1869 and 1919, we find that a scarcity of women strongly promoted early transitions to women's suffrage. Such scarcity significantly reduced the political costs and risks for male grantors of the suffrage. It might also have made women's suffrage attractive as a means to attract more women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have relied on votes recorded for the state blocs or a relatively small number of delegate votes. We construct a new data set covering delegate votes on over 600 substantive roll calls, and use the data in several ways. First, we estimate a single dimensional position for the delegates which reflects their overall voting patterns. Next, we explain these positions using a variety of delegate and constituent variables. Finally, we suggest a method for identifying state and floor medians, which can be used to predict equilibrium outcomes at the Convention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study tests the common assumption that wealthier interest groups have an advantage in policymaking by considering the lobbyist’s experience, connections, and lobbying intensity as well as the organization’s resources. Combining newly gathered information about lobbyists’ resources and policy outcomes with the largest survey of lobbyists ever conducted, I find surprisingly little relationship between organizations’ financial resources and their policy success—but greater money is linked to certain lobbying tactics and traits, and some of these are linked to greater policy success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses a purported relation between Keynesian economic policy and fiscal irresponsibility. Fiscal problems are said to result from the interaction of Keynesian economics with the political process in the U.S. The history of U.S. federal budget deficits and spending as compared to gross domestic product (GDP) is addressed. Differences between short-run prescriptions of higher government spending and long-run economic productivity are said to exist. The book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money," by John Maynard Keynes, is noted.

Objective We investigate whether voters in communities with high rates of foreclosure will find it more difficult to participate in elections, given social disruptions associated with home loss in their neighborhoods. Methods We estimate the community-level effects of foreclosure on turnout rates in California ZIP Codes during the 2008 presidential election and an individual-level turnout model using housing data merged with California voter data. Results Foreclosure rates are associated with reduced participation independent of local economic conditions, rates of education, ethnic composition, or individual partisanship, age, and habitual participation. Conclusion Given the relationship between the foreclosure crisis and political participation, this research suggests the need for further investigation. We are especially interested in the potential that housing foreclosure further exacerbates ethnic and economic inequality due to the preponderance of subprime loans, distressed mortgages, and foreclosures in communities of color and lower socioeconomic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using newly collected data, this article compares the wealth and status of New York City households who owned corporate stock to the general population both in 1791, when there were only two corporations in the state, and in 1826, when there were hundreds. The results indicate that although corporate stock was held principally by the city's elite merchants in both periods, share ownership became more widespread over time among less affluent households. In particular, later corporations were owned and managed by investors who were less wealthy than the stockholders of corporations created in earlier, less democratic periods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses what the authors refer to as the importance of continued U.S. investments in a global health security movement, and it mentions America's launch of the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) in 2014 and international efforts to prevent epidemics involving diseases such as Ebola. According to the article, U.S. funding for the GHSA is ending and American President Donald Trump's administration has failed to commit to future financial support.