Faculty Profiles

BIO

Professor Franzese’s research interests center on the comparative and international political economy (C&IPE) of developed democracies and related aspects of empirical methodology. In C&IPE, his work has focused on how political and economic (a) institutions (e.g., electoral & governmental systems, central bank independence, labor-market organization, etc.), (b) structure (e.g., income distribution, party-system polarization and fractionalization), and (c) circumstances/events (e.g., elections, terms-of-trade shocks, etc.) affect macroeconomic policymaking: its character and its efficacy. His approach to this substantive area is interdisciplinary (with economics), positive (i.e., as opposed to normative), and empirically minded. This research agenda has produced two books and numerous articles, chapters, and papers on the monetary- and fiscal-policy effects of, for example, international trade and finance, of globalization and tax and policy competition, and of participation, representation, veto actors, delegation, central bank independence, wage bargaining institutions, and international institutions. Professor Franzese’s research and pedagogical agendas in empirical methodology, which arise from this substantive agenda in C&IPE, have produced several more books and articles and chapters on (a) interactions and empirical-modeling strategies for complex context-conditionality more generally, (b) on empirical methodology for comparative politics broadly, (c) on multilevel modeling, and, more recently and extensively, (d) on spatial-econometric models of interdependence, that is of contexts where the outcomes in some units affect those in others.