Working Paper

Hall PA. Politics as a Process Structured in Space and Time. 2010.Abstract
causallogicsapsa.pdf
Prepared for a Workshop on Institutional Change, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, March 4-6, 2010. Please note this is a very rough draft. Comments welcome. What do we see when we look at the political world across space and time? In large measure, that depends on what we are looking for and the lens through which we look. This is as true of political science today as it was of seventeenth century scientists looking for phlogiston through rudimentary microscopes. Moreover, by conditioning what we can see, the lens we use conditions our assumptions about what we should see, notably about causal structures in the world, and thus what we find. From time to time, it is worthwhile asking whether we are looking for the right things through the right lenses.
Hall PA. The Political Origins of Our Economic Discontents: Contemporary Adjustment Problems in Historical Perspective. 2010.Abstract
gourevitch.pdf
For presentation at a Conference on Politics in the New Hard Times in honor of Peter Gourevitch, University of California, San Diego, April 24, 2010. This is a highly preliminary draft. Please do not cite or believe it without permission from the author. Comments welcome. What are the adjustment problems facing the political economies of the developed world in the wake of global recession, and what adjustment paths can they be expected to take? These are economic questions, about the sources of demand and supply in a chastened world, and political questions, about how the will to adjust will be generated. Such issues can be approached in various ways, but my premise is that, in the political economy as in the forest, if we want to know where we are going, it is useful to know where we are coming from. Therefore, this paper places the dilemmas of the present in the context of the recent past by analyzing how the OECD economies addressed parallel challenges in the decades after the Second World War.
Hall PA, Barnes L, Taylor RR. The Social Sources of the Health Gradient: A Cross-National Analysis. 2010.Abstract
The relationship between health and social class is firmly established but theoretical understanding of its determinants is not well advanced. Existing approaches have limitations and their propositions are rarely tested against each other. We outline a new approach to the problem that links class-based inequalities in health to imbalances between life challenges and people's capabilities for coping with them and locates the sources of those capabilities in multiple dimensions of the social and economic relations constitutive of class. We assess the support for this approach and the relative impact of material, social and cultural factors in a statistical analysis of individual-level data from nineteen developed democracies.
Hall PA. Central Bank Independence & Coordinated Wage Bargaining: Their Interaction in Germany & Europe. 1994.Abstract
psge_wp4_4.pdf
This paper explores the fashionable proposition that with a more independent central bank, a country can secure lower levels of inflation without higher unemployment. Hall shows that the operation of the central bank depends on the character of wage bargaining. He illustrates this point with some cross-national data and an analysis of how coordinated wage bargaining is secured in Germany. He concludes by exploring the implications of this analysis for European Monetary Union.