Calvin Thrall

Arnold A. Saltzman Professor in War and Peace Studies - New York City, New York (US) job with Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs | 37876354 The School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in the City of New York invites applications from scholars and practitioners ...

Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs is hiring to fill the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies—a full professor (/of practice) level position that comes with directorship of the Saltzman Institute. Please apply!

Something political science would benefit bigly from: World Politics style multi-book review articles where none of the books are written by political scientists. For example: one on “zones” featuring @atossaaraxia.bsky.social, Slobodian, etc. Let’s bring new stuff into the field!

Emailing all of my coauthors asking: “do you consider us to be *close* coauthors, or just normal ones?”

Congrats Clint! Very cool!

Academic job alert: The International Relations department at LSE is looking to hire two assistant professors, in international security and in IPE (climate, environment, global business). App deadline: 7th Sep 2025. Details👇

jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/I/...

So, Columbia paid out $221M so that the Trump administration would resume payments on $400M in existing grants (i.e., signed work contracts) and so that Columbia could compete for future HHS/NIH awards.

Lucy didn't even wait a week before pulling up the football.

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

A very worthwhile read from my colleague, Suresh Naidu. We are between a rock and a hard place, and it’s not particularly helpful to pretend that contracting with Trump settles anything.

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

My vacation rental has Why Nations Fail on the bookshelf, cementing its status as beach reading.

the single image every genuinely freedom-loving american has been waiting for

Wondering if I should infer that the mild ones are your go-to (hence running low) or that you keep them around in the event of a low spice tolerance visitor…

abstract: "Representation Without Influence: Evidence from Gender Disparities in the U.S. Foreign Service"

New working paper!

with @calvin-thrall.bsky.social and David Lindsey, we collect the largest existing dataset on diplomatic personnel, and use it to analyze gender disparities in U.S. Foreign Service assignments

draft here: mattmalis.github.io/files/pdf/LM...

🧵 below

Congrats again, Reilly, such great news for us. And I believe that, as an *associate* professor, academic tradition dictates that beers are on you from now on 😌

Tons more stuff in the paper. Please check it out (www.calvinthrall.com/assets/chamb...) - comments very welcome!

Using this data, I show that—as predicted—in cities with low levels of industrial diversification, dominant industries are *less likely* to join the local chamber. When diversification is high, chambers are much more representative of their local economies.

Table 3: Local Chamber Membership Rates in Twenty Selected Municipalities. Municipality Chamber Members Establishments in City Membership Rate Ann Arbor, MI 838 4827 0.17 Aurora, IL 603 3914 0.15 Bakersfield, CA 1022 10667 0.10 Billings, MT 938 5430 0.17 Boulder, CO 1210 6652 0.18 Bowling Green, KY 1829 2849 0.64 Chandler, AZ 1215 7496 0.16 Greensboro, NC 1315 9634 0.14 Lubbock, TX 1765 7325 0.24 Memphis, TN 1669 14751 0.11 Oakland, CA 824 10210 0.08 Omaha, NE 2530 16304 0.16 Portland, OR 2092 32149 0.07 Providence, RI 954 5788 0.16 Rochester, NY 1370 11592 0.12 Salt Lake City, UT 1408 18066 0.08 San Antonio, TX 1492 36704 0.04 Tacoma, WA 1373 8048 0.17 Tampa, FL 1090 29498 0.04 Tulsa, OK 1589 14341 0.11 Average: 1356 12812 0.15

To test the mechanism, I scrape full membership directories for 20 local chambers. Comparing member counts to admin data on the total number of enterprises per city suggests an average membership rate of 15%—MASSIVE compared to most civil orgs. Local business is very organized!

TLDR: using a novel shift-share instrument, I show industrial diversification is a strong predictor of both municipal and county chamber formation during the 1970-2015 period. Lots of robustness stuff too (check out the paper).

Figure 2: The number of U.S. municipalities and counties with local chambers of commerce has increased sharply since 1947.

To test the theory, I collect novel data on 11,000+ past and present local chambers in the U.S. from state corporate registries (thanks to @opencorporates.bsky.social ). I show that the number of U.S. municipalities and counties with their own chamber sharply increased over the 20th c.

I theorize that this makes local level business organization more favorable: when firms’ industry competitors are more geographically dispersed, any locally-specific policy benefits will accrue mainly to them and not to their competitors in other cities.

Figure 1: County-level industrial specialization has been in decline since 1947. (a) Average county-level industrial specialization, 1947-2015. The vertical line separates the "early" CBP series from the modern series.

I argue that the answer lies in the changing industrial makeup of U.S. localities over the 20th c. Gone are the days of the “industry town”—instead, the average U.S. county is home to a more diverse range of industries than ever before.

Industrial Diversification and the Rise of the Local Chamber* Calvin Thrall June 04, 2025 Abstract Despite the well-documented nationalization of local politics over the late 20th century, one type of local organization has flourished: the chamber of commerce. Local chambers, influential interest groups in which firms operating in a given municipality band together to lobby for improved local business conditions, are now present in over 6,700 municipalities across nearly 2,300 counties. Why has the private sector been so successful at organizing locally, despite the costs inherent in collective ac-tion? I argue that industrial diversification at the local level makes chamber formation more likely; when firms are co-located with complementary industries rather than direct competitors, lobbying for geographically-specific ("place-based") benefits offers greater relative gains. I provide evidence in support of this explanation using new data on thousands of local chambers incorporated between 1970 and 2018, an identification strategy based on a novel Bartik-style shift-share instrument, and member-level data for twenty individual chambers. The results demonstrate how broader patterns of structural economic change have affected interest representation at the local level.

🚨 New working paper 🚨

In an era of political nationalization, here’s something interesting: locally organized business interest groups—eg “chambers of commerce”—are more popular than ever. Why is that?

Abstract of "Offshore Outlaws: Brexit and Oil Spills in the North Sea" by Anthony Calacino, Federica Genovese, Hayley Pring (University of Oxford)

🚨 WP w/ @acalacino.bsky.social & @hayleypring.bsky.social

It’s been a turbulent decade of globalization backlash. Populist projects wanna take back control everywhere.

Focusing on the case of oil and Brexit, we offer a story of the danger of this narrative and concrete merits of multilateralism: 🧵

Nice! Would be cool to contrast with the rise of executive intl agreements (see eg scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scho...)

📢 [New Research] 📢 We tracked EVERY S&P 500 company's reaction to Fed announcements for 20 years

The Paris Climate Agreement didn't just change environmental policy—it completely flipped how Wall Street prices sustainability during rate hikes.

From -28.5bp penalty to +64.5bp protection 📈🧵

My ambassador paper with Shu Fu is out in @worldpolitics.bsky.social!

Ambassadors promote domestic exports to a host country and represent the interests of their home country at large. However, are trade benefits equally distributed domestically? 🧵
muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

At this point, the primary value of interviewing Trump appointees seems to be documenting the administration’s lies for posterity.

Is this just because they switched to citing exit, voice, and loyalty when it came out in 1970?

Edit to the viral @dril tweet that read "and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad" to make it read "and another thing: tariffs don't raise prices. please dont put in the Amazon receipt that tariffs raise prices."

Lmao

A real IPE legend—Ted was one of the first to really grok the political implications of the rise of the multinational firm, and we are all richer for it. May he rest in peace.

Happy to circulate a revised version of our paper, "Exiting Russia" - on what did (not) happen with MNCs leaving Russia in the first 18 months post-invasion. Outcomes both reinforce and challenge key theories in international political economy. www.rwellhausen.com/uploads/6/9/...