Industrial Policy

Together with Fabio Bulfone and Erez Maggor I have just published a paper on conditionality in industrial policy. ...

Conditionality was a central concern in the development literature of the 1990s. With the significant expansion of targeted public support to private firms since the Great Financial Crisis, the issue of conditionality has once again become a focal point in industrial policy debates. Despite the growing interest in the concept, the existing literature lacks a systematic conceptualization of conditionality within the context of industrial policy and does not outline the political factors that enable state actors to introduce it. This article addresses this gap by critically reviewing the existing literature and providing a systematic political economy of conditionality. We offer an overview of the literature on conditionality, examining different industries, historical periods, and national contexts. In doing so, we make three key contributions to the debate on industrial policy and regulatory instruments more broadly. First, we distinguish between two broad approaches to encoding conditionality in industrial policy: hard-coding and soft-coding. Next, we map the coalitional, institutional, ideational, and global contextual factors that facilitate conditionality. Finally, we present two vignettes of recent industrial policy initiatives in the European Union and the United States as illustrative cases. This conceptual exercise, intended to lay the foundation for future causal research on conditionality, demonstrates that the presence of conditionality is not merely a technical matter of political design but is instead shaped by configurations of political economy factors.

Together with Luuk Schmitz I have just published a paper on the evolution of European climate policies. ...

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state-building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning.

Together with Donato Di Carlo, Anke Hassel, Kate McNamara, and Manuela Moschella I’m organizing the Villa Vigoni-Gespräch ‘Europe and the Geoeconomic Challenge’, 22 to 24 April 2025, Loveno di Menaggio, Italy. We’re inviting applications for up to three advanced students and early career researchers to participate. The deadline for applications is 10 January 2025. A detailed call for applications can be found here.

Together with Valentina Ausserladscheider and Philipp Golka I’m organizing a SASE mini-conference on the Socio-economics of asset stranding in Montréal in July 2025. If you’re working on climate change mitigation and adaptation please consider joining us. A detailed call can be found here.

Together with Valentina Ausserladscheider and Philipp Golka I’m organizing a SASE mini-conference on the Socio-economics of asset stranding in Montréal in July 2025. If you’re working on climate change mitigation and adaptation please consider joining us. A detailed call can be found here.

Together with Fabio Bulfone and Erez Maggor I have just published a paper on the politics of conditionality in industrial policy. ...

This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE) by developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare—the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality—is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, without a well-developed concept of corporate welfare—premised upon the key criterion of conditionality—studies that identify a ‘return’ of the state in industrial planning misrepresent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for empirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.

A new paper in Competition & Change on the decline of conditionality in state aid to business. ...

I’ve contributed a chapter to Klaus Kraemer’s and Sascha Münnich’s edited volume on the sociology of economic nationalism. My chapter investigates the EU’s trade policy response to overcapacity in the solar industry as a moral economic conflict.

This intensive seminar covers social science perspectives on technological innovation as a core driver of economic and social dynamics, examining origins, forms, effects, and societal reactions to innovation.

The paper compares technology policies for coal liquifaction and solar energy in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that there’s a dilemma between commercializing specific technologies and supporting keeping technological options open.

The book reconstructs the history of policies to support solar photovoltaics across countries.