Business, Government & the International Economy

Business, Government & the International Economy

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    • Article

    Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.

    By: Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Tabellini

    How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrant assimilation? To answer this question, we assemble novel data from the Catholic directories to measure the presence of Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. Exploiting variation in the timing of church entry across counties, we find that Italian churches had ambiguous effects on immigrant assimilation. Italian churches reduced social assimilation along dimensions that require more inter-group interactions, such as intermarriage and residential choices, but had no, if anything positive, effects on assimilation outcomes fully under individual control, like names chosen by parents for their US born children. Moreover, while Italian churches increased immigrants' labor force participation, they induced Italians to select jobs with fewer opportunities for occupational upgrading. We provide evidence that enhanced coordination within the Italian community and natives' backlash are plausible pathways for our results. We also identify patterns of selective migration of Italians following church entries. However, these are quantitatively small and cannot explain our findings. Despite the ambiguous effects on adults' outcomes, Italian churches benefited children, raising their literacy and ability to speak English.

    • Article

    Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.

    By: Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Tabellini

    How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrant assimilation? To answer this question, we assemble novel data from the Catholic directories to measure the presence of Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. Exploiting variation...

    • July 2025
    • Case

    Latinas Contra Cancer

    By: Reshmaan Hussam and Vi Le

    • July 2025
    • Case

    Latinas Contra Cancer

    By: Reshmaan Hussam and Vi Le

    • June 2025
    • Case

    That's Bananas! Art, Value and Our Capitalist way of Life

    By: Sophus A. Reinert and Rafael Di Tella

About the Unit

The BGIE Unit conducts research on, and teaches about, the economic, political, social, and legal environment in which business operates. The Unit includes scholars trained in economics, political science, and history; in its work, it draws on perspectives from all three of these disciplines.

The following demonstrates one way of classifying the approaches the Unit takes to learning and teaching.

  • The Unit examines the “rules” and policies established by government and other non-business institutions that affect business in the United States.
  • The Unit turns to history to understand the origins of today’s business environment as well as some of the alternatives that have emerged from time to time.
  • The Unit examines other countries’ business environments and their historical development.
  • The BGIE group is deeply interested in the impact of globalization and the way rules are emerging to govern international economic transactions as globalization proceeds.

Recent Publications

Faith and Assimilation: Italian Immigrants in the U.S.

By: Stefano Gagliarducci and Marco Tabellini
  • Article |
  • Economic Journal
How do ethnic religious organizations influence immigrant assimilation? To answer this question, we assemble novel data from the Catholic directories to measure the presence of Italian Catholic churches in the US between 1890 and 1920, when four million Italians moved to America, and anti-Catholic sentiments were widespread. Exploiting variation in the timing of church entry across counties, we find that Italian churches had ambiguous effects on immigrant assimilation. Italian churches reduced social assimilation along dimensions that require more inter-group interactions, such as intermarriage and residential choices, but had no, if anything positive, effects on assimilation outcomes fully under individual control, like names chosen by parents for their US born children. Moreover, while Italian churches increased immigrants' labor force participation, they induced Italians to select jobs with fewer opportunities for occupational upgrading. We provide evidence that enhanced coordination within the Italian community and natives' backlash are plausible pathways for our results. We also identify patterns of selective migration of Italians following church entries. However, these are quantitatively small and cannot explain our findings. Despite the ambiguous effects on adults' outcomes, Italian churches benefited children, raising their literacy and ability to speak English.
Keywords: Assimilation; Religious Organizations; Immigration; Religion; History; United States
Related

Latinas Contra Cancer (B)

By: Reshmaan Hussam and Vi Le
  • July 2025 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Latinas Contra Cancer

By: Reshmaan Hussam and Vi Le
  • July 2025 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Economic Integration and the Transmission of Democracy

By: Marco Tabellini and Giacomo Magistretti
  • July 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Review of Economic Studies
In this paper, we study the effects of economic integration with democratic partners on democracy. We assemble a large country-level panel dataset from 1960 to 2015, and exploit improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation to derive a time-varying instrument for economic integration. We find that economic integration with democracies increases countries’ democracy scores, whereas the impact of economic integration with non-democracies is muted. Results are stronger when democratic partners have a longer history of democracy, grow faster, spend more on public goods, are culturally closer, and export higher quality goods. The effects we document are driven by imports, rather than exports, and by integration with democratic partners that account for a larger share of a country’s trade in institutionally intensive, cultural, and consumer goods, as well as in goods that involve more face-to-face interactions and entail higher levels of bilateral trust. These patterns are consistent with economic integration favoring the transmission of democracy by signaling the (actual or perceived) desirability of democratic institutions. Alternative mechanisms—including human capital accumulation and economic growth—cannot, alone, explain our findings.
Keywords: Democratization; Institutional Development; Economic Integration; International Trade; Democracy; Political Preferences; Institutions; Trade; Global Range; Economics; Government and Politics
Related

Crossing Borders, Dividing Politics: U.S. Immigration Policy and Political Polarization

By: Marco Tabellini and Alexis Lefort
  • June 2025 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
This case explores the history and political dynamics of U.S. immigration policy, focusing on its evolution from the 18th century to 2025. It traces key legislative milestones, such as the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, DACA, and the 2025 Laken Riley Act, highlighting how immigration policy has repeatedly intersected with economic interests, national security concerns, and views on race and ethnicity. Set against the backdrop of the 2024 presidential election and rising public anxiety over border security and cultural change, the case examines the persistent political polarization that has made comprehensive immigration reform elusive.
Keywords: Immigration; National Security; Government Legislation; United States
Related

That's Bananas! Art, Value and Our Capitalist way of Life

By: Sophus A. Reinert and Rafael Di Tella
  • June 2025 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Related

Public Displays of Alignment: Firm Speech in Autocratic Regimes

By: Joris Mueller, Jaya Y. Wen and Cheryl Wu
  • 2025 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Political speech by firms is increasingly common around the world. This paper examines the government as an important, yet understudied, audience for such speech, focusing on how Chinese firms rhetorically align with the state. We introduce novel, general, and replicable quantitative measures of rhetorical alignment, using which we establish several empirical facts: (i) rhetorical alignment is prevalent but not universal; (ii) it has increased significantly over time; (iii) it is more pronounced in state-owned and strategic sectors; and (iv) it is negatively correlated with profitability and positively correlated with performance on political and social objectives. Exploiting two natural experiments, we further show that (v) rhetorically aligned firms experience larger stock price declines following events damaging the Party’s reputation, and (vi) firms increase rhetorical alignment after regulatory inspections. Guided by these findings, we propose a conceptual framework wherein rhetorical alignment serves as a commitment device: firms commit to supporting Party interests, and the Party commits to refraining from expropriation. Additional predictions of the framework are tested and supported by the data.
Keywords: Business and Government Relations; Economic Systems; Power and Influence; Government Administration; Policy; China
Related

Integral Outside: The Financial Curb Market, the Electric Telegraph, and the Politics of Pricing in Second Empire France

By: Charlotte Robertson
  • June 2025 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of Modern History
Financial markets in nineteenth-century France were far more complex than an analysis of the official Bourse or its state-authorized brokers would suggest. Most financial transactions occurred on an illegal yet tacitly tolerated curb market called the coulisse, which played a vital role in expanding market liquidity during the Second Empire while also attracting controversy as a site of complex speculative activity. Existing historiography attributes the 1859 suppression of the Paris coulisse to aggravated competition between state-authorized brokers and coulissiers following the market downturn of 1857–58. Based on police, ministerial, prefectoral, and judicial archives, I present an alternate account that stresses the twin roles of financial innovation and the telecommunications revolution in breaching the limits of the state’s tacit toleration for the coulisse. I emphasize the lesser known coulisse in Marseille, suppressed at the height of a bull market in 1855, to formulate an alternative explanation of the 1859 suppression of its counterpart in Paris. I conclude that the rising importance of the curb markets in both cities reflected the robust, short-term options market developing among coulissiers. Public attention given to the coulisse price lists—distributed via newly opened telegraph lines—challenged the legitimacy of official brokers as authoritative sources of price information and compromised the political interests of the Bonapartist state, which proved decisive in the crackdown.
Keywords: Financial Markets; History; Communication Technology; Knowledge Dissemination; France
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Business, Government & the International Economy Unit
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
BGIE@hbs.edu