Research Seminars

2024 - 2025 Series -- View Series PDF

• November 13, 2024: Evan Brown, “Keeping Score: Labor and Information on Baseball's Money Market”

  The paper is based on the third chapter of Brown’s Columbia University dissertation in progress. It follows management grappling with a changing baseball labor market over the 1950s. It argues that their own crackdown on labor mobility (previous chapter), in combination with labor market expansion through racial desegregation and international recruitment, heaped pressure on the systems of scouting and information used to make baseball’s messy labor pool legible and profitable.

• December 18, 2024: Richard John, “The Folklore of Thurman Arnold: Anti-Monopoly in the Shadow of War”

  Thurman Arnold’s tenure as head of the antitrust division at the U. S. Justice Department has long been regarded as a pivotal event in mid-twentieth-century U. S. government business relations. Most historical writing on this topic (eg Alan Brinkley, Ellis Hawley, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) views it in relationship to the Democratic party’s failed attempt to restructure the U. S. political economy—a project struck down by the U. S. Supreme Court. That is, they treat it as a chapter in domestic politics. This paper, in contrast, locates Arnold’s tenure in its international context—with a particular focus on his critique of the cartelization of German business under the Nazi regime.