Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Sociology, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

My research interests lie at the intersection of economic sociology, political economy and the sociology of science. My current work poses the question: what is the role of economic experts, particularly professional economists, in shaping economic policies and institutions in the developing world? In particular, how do experts shape the complex monetary and financial systems that contemporary global economy in the context of all too frequent instability and crisis? Do developments in economic knowledge since the 1970s represent increasing rationalization of these systems, or do they represent the ideology and interests of bureaucrats themselves? -- or is neither of these frequently-voiced views accurate?

My dissertation, entitled "Power and Pesos: Economics, Expertise and the Politics of Money in Mexico and Argentina" explores these issues in the Latin American context. Both Mexico and Argentina have experienced profound monetary instability: high and hyperinflation in the 1980s and currency collapses in the 1990s, before achieving relative stability more recently. In both countries, professional economists frequently assume top government positions in the finance ministries and central banks (to a far greater extent than the US, for example). In order to understand the influence of economists in government, I argue, it is necessary to see them as simultaneously constrained by their career interests as bureaucrats in the state and motivated by concerns with professional prestige and legitimacy.

To date, I have reached two major conclusions. First, unlike areas of economic policy such as trade liberalization and privatization (policies at the core of the so-called "Washington consensus") the economics profession has not reached a consensus on many issues relevant to monetary and exchange rate policy. Rather than a "paradigm shift" in the direction of free-market neoclassical economics, I argue that the process of change in macroeconomics since the 1970s needs to be understood as a more complex process of fragmentation and synthesis. Second, absent a global consensus, whether or not elite expert policymakers reach a national consensus (at least among themselves) in a country depends on the social structure of the field of economic policy expertise. I show that the network structure of the Mexican policy elite has been highly cohesive since at least the early 1990s, while the structure of the Argentine elite has been diffuse and fragmented.