You could not know this, but the U.S. imposes a 12.five % import tariff on imported flashlights. Even so, for a solution category the federal government describes as “portable electric lamps created to function by their personal supply of power, other than flashlights,” the import tariff is just three.five %.
At a glance, this appears inexplicable. Why is 1 type of self-powered transportable light taxed much more heavily than a further? According to MIT political science professor In Song Kim, a policy discrepancy like this typically stems from the distinction in firms’ political energy, as properly as the extent to which firms are empowered by international production networks. This is a topic Kim has spent years examining in detail, creating original scholarly final results even though opening up a wealth of large information about politics to the public.
“We all recognize providers as getting vital financial agents,” Kim says. “But providers are political agents, also. They are pretty vital political actors.”
In unique, Kim’s operate has illuminated the effects of lobbying upon U.S. trade policy. International trade is typically presented as an unalloyed superior, opening up markets and fueling development. Beyond that, trade difficulties are ordinarily described at the market level we hear about what the agriculture lobby or auto market desires. But in reality, various firms want various points, even inside the identical market.
As Kim’s operate shows, most firms lobby for policies pertaining to certain elements of their items, and trade policy consists heavily of carve-outs for providers, not market-wide requirements. Firms generating non-flashlight transportable lights, it would look, are superior at lobbying, but the advantages clearly do not carry more than to all transportable light makers, as lengthy as items are not excellent substitutes for every other. Meanwhile, as Kim’s investigation also shows, lobbying assists firms develop more rapidly in size, even as lobbying-influenced policies could slow down the economy as a complete.
“All our current theories recommend that trade policy is a public superior, in the sense that the advantages of open trade, the gains from trade, will be enjoyed by the public and will advantage the nation as a complete,” Kim says. “But what I’ve discovered is that trade policies are pretty, pretty granular. It is come to be apparent to me that trade is no longer a public superior. It is truly a private superior for person providers.”
Kim’s operate involves more than a dozen published journal articles more than the final quite a few years, quite a few other forthcoming investigation papers, and a book he is at present writing. At the identical time, Kim has developed a public database, LobbyView, which tracks revenue in U.S. politics extending back to 1999. LobbyView, as an vital collection of political data, has investigation, educational, and public-interest applications, enabling other people, in academia or outdoors it, to additional delve into the subject.
“I want to contribute to the scholarly neighborhood, and I also want to produce a public [resource] for our MIT neighborhood [and beyond], so we can all study politics via it,” Kim says.
Maintaining the public superior in sight
Kim grew up in South Korea, in a setting exactly where politics was central to each day life. Kim’s grandfather, Kim jae-quickly, was the Speaker of the National Assembly in South Korea from 1988 via 1990 and an vital figure in the country’s government.
“I’ve normally been fascinated by politics,” says Kim, who remembers prominent political figures dropping by the family members household when he was young. A single of the principal lessons Kim discovered about politics from his grandfather, having said that, was not about proximity to energy, but the significance of public service. The enduring lesson of his family’s engagement with politics, Kim says, is that “I definitely think in contributing to the public superior.”
Kim’s located his personal way of contributing to the public superior not as a politician but as a scholar of politics. Kim received his BA in political science from Yonsei University in Seoul but decided he wanted to pursue graduate research in the U.S. He earned an MA in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher College of Tufts University, then an MA in political science at George Washington University. By this time, Kim had come to be focused on the quantitative evaluation of trade policy for his PhD operate, he attended Princeton University and was awarded his doctorate in 2014, joining the MIT faculty that year.
Amongst the essential pieces of investigation Kim has published, 1 paper, “Political Cleavages inside Market: Firm-level Lobbying for Trade Liberalization,” published in the American Political Science Evaluation and developing out of his dissertation investigation, helped show how remarkably specialized a lot of trade policies are. As of 2017, the U.S. had pretty much 17,000 kinds of items it produced tariff choices about. A lot of of these are the element components of a solution about two-thirds of international trade consists of manufactured elements that get shipped about in the course of the production course of action, rather than raw goods or completed items. That paper won the 2018 Michael Wallerstein Award for the very best published report in political economy in the preceding year.
A different 2017 paper Kim co-authored, “The Charmed Life of Superstar Exporters,” from the Journal of Politics, supplies much more empirical proof of the variations amongst firms inside an market. The “superstar” firms that are the biggest exporters have a tendency to lobby the most about trade politics a firm’s traits reveal much more about its preferences for open trade than the possibility that its market as a complete will achieve a comparative benefit internationally.
Kim typically makes use of massive-scale information and computational solutions to study international trade and trade politics. Nonetheless a further paper he has co-authored, “Measuring Trade Profile with Granular Item-level Trade Information,” published in the American Journal of Political Science in 2020, traces trade relationships in extremely certain terms. Searching at more than two billion observations of international trade information, Kim created an algorithm to group nations primarily based on which items they import and export. The methodology assists researchers to discover about the extremely various developmental paths that nations adhere to, and about the deepening international competitors in between nations such as the U.S. and China.
At other occasions, Kim has analyzed who is influencing trade policy. His paper “Mapping Political Communities,” from the journal Political Evaluation in 2021, appears at the U.S. Congress and makes use of mandatory reports filed by lobbyists to create a image of which interests groups are most closely connected to which politicians.
Kim has published all his papers even though balancing each his scholarly investigation and the public launch of LobbyView, which occurred in 2018. He was awarded tenure by MIT in the spring of 2022. At present he is an associate professor in the Division of Political Science and a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Information, Systems, and Society.
By the book
Kim has continued to discover firm-level lobbying dynamics, though his current investigation runs in a couple of directions. In a 2021 functioning paper, Kim and co-author Federico Huneeus of the Central Bank of Chile constructed a model estimating that eliminating lobbying in the U.S. could improve productivity by as substantially as six %.
“Political rents [favorable policies] provided to unique providers may introduce inefficiencies or a misallocation of sources in the economy,” Kim says. “You could allocate these sources to much more productive though politically inactive firms, but now they are provided to significantly less productive and but politically active large providers, escalating market place concentration and monopolies.”
Kim is on sabbatical in the course of the 2022-23 academic year, functioning on a book about the significance of firms’ political activities in trade policymaking. The book will have an expansive timeframe, dating back to ancient occasions, which underscores the salience of trade policy across eras. At the identical time, the book will analyze the distinctive options of contemporary trade politics with deepening international production networks.
“I’m attempting to let men and women to discover about the history of trade politics, to show how the politics have changed more than time,” Kim says. “In carrying out that, I’m also highlighting the significance of firm-to-firm trade and the emergence of new trade coalitions amongst firms in various nations and industries that are linked via the global production chain.”
Whilst continuing his personal scholarly investigation, Kim nevertheless leads LobbyView, which he views each as a large information resource for any scholars interested in revenue in politics and an superb teaching resource for his MIT classes, as students can tap into it for projects and papers. LobbyView includes so substantially information, in reality, that component of the challenge is obtaining approaches to mine it proficiently.
“It seriously delivers me an chance to operate with MIT students,” Kim says of LobbyView. “What I believe I can contribute is to bring these technologies to our understanding of politics. Obtaining this exceptional information set can seriously let students right here to use technologies to discover about politics, and I think that fits the MIT identity.”