Infrastructure over the Longue Durée

We are seeking research assistants to work on the long-term history of infrastructure finance. There are multiple goals of the project. The first project is to assemble empirical data necessary for a study of infrastructure development. This will involve collecting data relevant to the global political and geopolitical context. The second is to create a database of deal-level data for major infrastructure developments that allow the study of multi-party negotiations around long-term, large-scale technological transformation.

The financial dimension of the project will focus on institutional forms of capital investment over the period 1800 to the present. This will entail (1) working with historical database of infrastructure-related securities traded on global capital markets (2) gathering data on government-funded infrastructure (3) bank loan and private funded infrastructure and (3) infrastructure funding by international institutions.

The geopolitical dimension will collect political, macroeconomic and personage information around major infrastructure efforts. This will allow us to test hypotheses about the role of non-domestic financing, the geopolitical configurations (eg. multi-polar vs. hegemonic) that lead to rapid infrastructure growth.

The technical dimension will involve the collection of basic data at the country/year level on infrastructure from 19th century canal systems to 21st century AI-optimized data centers. It will also document technological innovations and the regulatory, educational and agglomerative context that facilitated technical solutions.

The domestic political dimension will collect and classify US political systems through time and geographies to test theories about what political equilibria impede or foster domestic infrastructure development. The governance dimension will analyze the effectiveness of corporate and governmental organizational structures. This will address issues of agency, corruption, management of scale and scope, cross-border management etc.