Stanford University

International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Failure IS an Option: The Effect of Bankruptcy on New Venture Performance

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About the seminar

This talk will describe new research showing that bankruptcy law reforms affect the rate of founding by well-educated and older entrepreneurs and the performance of their ventures.

The seminar will show the results of a natural experiment in Japan where changes to bankruptcy laws reduced the consequences of closing a company to find that:

  1. likelihood of bankruptcy increases, especially for firms founded by elite entrepreneurs
  2. elite entrepreneurs form an increasing proportion of the new firms
  3. new firm performance increases as these elite entrepreneurs are more likely to found higher performing firms.

While prior research emphasizes the lowering of entry barriers, our work suggests that reducing the "barriers to failure" can stimulate venture formation among elite individuals leading to higher performing firms. Overall, we find that legal reforms that reduce failure barriers encourage "better", not just 'more", entrepreneurs to found ventures.

This talk is part of the seminar series hosted by the Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) at Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneruship, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and sponsored by The Miner Foundation.

M105, McCelleand Building, Knight Management Center, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Robert Eberhart Speaker
William F. Miller Moderator
Seminars
Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE)

How Governmental Corruption Breeds Clientelism: Evidence from Mexico

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Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Ana L. De la O Assistant professor, Political Science, Yale University Speaker
Seminars

Panel and Special Reception to Meet the Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford

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The Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law invites you to a special event and reception to meet the second class of Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Stanford.

Hailing from Malaysia, South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area, this group is working to advance the rights of women, minority groups and refugees around the world.

Please join us for this special occasion to meet this innovative group, learn more about their work and celebrate their arrival to Stanford.

Bechtel Conference Center

Zainah Anwar Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence Panelist
Mazibuko Jara Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence Panelist
Emily Arnold-Fernandez Social Entrepreneur-in-Residence Panelist
Deborah L. Rhode Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law Moderator Stanford Law School
Conferences

Alternative Approaches to Development: Modernization, Institutional Capacity and Elite Bargains

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Understanding trajectories of political and economic change or development is one of the biggest challenges for social science. Within American academia there is an inchoate discussion involving three different approaches. Modernization theory has been very well researched and posits that socio-economic change leads to political change and ultimately to liberal democracy. Institutional capacity places emphasis first and foremost on establishing political order; without order development is impossible. Elite bargaining approaches focus on deals among elites that can be locked in through path-dependent processes.

The work of Professor Stephen Krasner deals primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy and the political determinants of international economic relations. He served as Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State from 2005 to 2007, where he was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He is also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His major publications include Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investment and American Foreign Policy (1978), Structural Conflict:The Third World Against Global Liberalism (1985) and Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999). He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. 

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Stanford Center at Peking University

Stephen D. Krasner

CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-0676 (650) 724-2996
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Emeritus
krasner.jpg MA, PhD

Stephen Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations. A former director of CDDRL, Krasner is also an FSI senior fellow, and a fellow of the Hoover Institution.

From February 2005 to April 2007 he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department. While at the State Department, Krasner was a driving force behind foreign assistance reform designed to more effectively target American foreign aid. He was also involved in activities related to the promotion of good governance and democratic institutions around the world.

At CDDRL, Krasner was the coordinator of the Program on Sovereignty. His work has dealt primarily with sovereignty, American foreign policy, and the political determinants of international economic relations. Before coming to Stanford in 1981 he taught at Harvard University and UCLA. At Stanford, he was chair of the political science department from 1984 to 1991, and he served as the editor of International Organization from 1986 to 1992.

He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (1987-88) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2000-2001). In 2002 he served as director for governance and development at the National Security Council. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

His major publications include Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investment and American Foreign Policy (1978), Structural Conflict: The Third World Against Global Liberalism (1985), Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (1999), and How to Make Love to a Despot (2020). Publications he has edited include International Regimes (1983), Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (co-editor, 1999),  Problematic Sovereignty: Contested Rules and Political Possibilities (2001), and Power, the State, and Sovereignty: Essays on International Relations (2009). He received a BA in history from Cornell University, an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and a PhD in political science from Harvard.

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Stephen D. Krasner The Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University Speaker
Lectures

Discussant comments on “Food systems and human health and nutrition: An economic policy perspective with a focus on Africa”

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Eran Bendavid, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford University provides commentary on nutrition and food policy expert Per Pinstrup-Andersen's presentation and paper on "Food systems and human health and nutrition". The symposium and paper are part of the Center on Food Security and the Environment's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium series.

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Food systems and human health and nutrition: An economic policy perspective with a focus on Africa

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  • Per Pinstrup-Andersen
Food systems and human health and nutrition: An economic policy perspective with a focus on Africa
Books
October 2012
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Center on Food Security and the Environment, Stanford University
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Eran Bendavid

Veriene Melo

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Veriene_Melo.jpg MA

Veriene Melo is a research and program assistant with the Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov) at CDDRL. She graduated from Stanford University in 2012 with an MA in Latin American Studies and was the recipient of a full fellowship from the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho Foundation, which is awarded to promising students from Latin America. She also holds a BA with honors in International Studies and Spanish from the University of Colorado Denver.

Born and raised in the Baixada Fluminense in Rio's North zone, Veriene feels passionate about issues of socio-economic development in disenfranchised communities, social justice education, and public security in the Latin America region, particularly in her home country of Brazil. At PovGov, under the leadership of Professor Beatriz Magaloni, she works on several policy-oriented research projects about the Pacification security program, police reform, criminal violence, and youth education, all with a focus in Rio de Janeiro's favelas and peripheries. Some of her main responsibilities include: helping design qualitative and quantitative instruments for data collection, taking part in fieldwork and transcribing interviews/observations, entering, coding and analyzing data using the appropriate analysis tools, preparing papers and briefs describing and interpreting study findings, as well as conducting and annotating literature reviews.

Veriene is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Social Science and Comparative Education at UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSE&IS) and a Fellow from the Lemann foundation, a non-profit organization that is helping train a generation of leaders in some of the world's best universities committed to improving the educational scenario in Brazil. Her dissertation project seeks to investigate into the individual and community benefits of a Rio-based non-formal educational program attending hundreds of youth from some of Rio's poorest communities using qualitative methodological tools and a critical pedagogy theoretical framework. 

 

 

Program and Research Assistant, Program on Poverty and Governance (PovGov)
Doctoral Candidate in Social Science and Comparative Education, UCLA

Martin Hellman

Not in residence

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CISAC Affiliated Faculty Member
Professor (Emeritus) of Electrical Engineering
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Martin E. Hellman is professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford, a recipient (joint with Whit Diffie) of the million dollar ACM Turing Award, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and an inductee of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He became a CISAC affiliated faculty member in October 2012.

Hellman is best known for his invention, with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, of public key cryptography. In addition to many other uses, this technology forms the basis for secure transactions and cybersecurity on the Internet. He also has been a long-time contributor to the computer privacy debate, starting with the issue of DES key size in 1975 and continuing with service (1994-96) on the National Research Council's Committee to Study National Cryptographic Policy, whose main recommendations were implemented soon afterward.

Prof. Hellman also has a deep interest in the ethics of technological development. With Prof. Anatoly Gromyko of Moscow, he co-edited Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, a book published simultaneously in Russian and English in 1987 during the rapid change in Soviet-American relations (available as a free, 2.6 MB PDF download). In 1986, he and his wife of fifty years published, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home & Peace on the Planet, a book that provides a “unified field theory” for successful relationships by illuminating the connections between nuclear war, conventional war, interpersonal war, and war within our own psyches (available as a free, 1.2 MB PDF download).
 
His current research is devoted to bringing a risk-informed framework to nuclear deterrence and critically examining the assumptions that underlie our national security.

Prof. Hellman was at IBM's Watson Research Center from 1968-69 and an assistant professor of EE at MIT from 1969-71. Returning to Stanford in 1971, he served on the regular faculty until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1996. He has authored over seventy technical papers, six US patents and a number of foreign equivalents.

More information on Professor Hellman is available on his EE Department website. His publications, many  of which can be downloaded in PDF, are on the publications page of that site.

Stanford president emeritus discusses priority areas for Japan's universities

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Following the recent Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue, Gerhard Casper, Stanford president emeritus and current FSI director, spoke with the Asahi Shimbun about the need for Japanese students to study abroad and for universities to be given more autonomy.
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Students at Japan's Ritsumeikan University take a break between classes and studying. | Flickr user JanneM
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Dealing with Kazakhstan’s Soviet nuclear legacy

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When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, the independent Republic of Kazakhstan was left with the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal and a huge nuclear infrastructure, including lots of fissile materials, several nuclear reactors, the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, and the enormous Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. The return of the nuclear weapons to Russia (thanks to former Secretary of Defense William Perry), the transport of vulnerable highly-enriched uranium to the U.S. (Project Sapphire), the disposition of the fast reactor fuel, and upgrading of security and safeguards at its research reactors have been the subject of numerous reports. The story of what has been done with what the Soviets left behind at the test site and the dangers it presented will be the main topic of my presentation. It is a great story of how scientists from three countries worked together effectively among themselves and with their governments to deal with one of the greatest nuclear dangers in the post-Cold War era.

About the speaker: Siegfried S. Hecker is co-director of the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor (Research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. He also served as Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986-1997. Dr. Hecker’s research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapon policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. Over the past 20 years, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. His current interests include the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan, North Korea, the nuclear aspirations of Iran and the peaceful spread of nuclear energy in Central Asia and South Korea. Dr. Hecker has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, reporting back to U.S. government officials on North Korea’s nuclear progress and testifying in front of the U.S. Congress. He is a fellow of numerous professional societies and received the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award.

CISAC Conference Room

Siegfried S. Hecker

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-6468 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Research Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
hecker2.jpg PhD

Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.

Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.

Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.

Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

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