Center for Public Policy Events

Shanker Satyanath, Professor at the New York University

Date: November 5, 2026

Time: 11:30am

Location: Heritage Room (201), Bates Hall 

Paper title: Fascist Ideology and Migrant Labor Exploitation (with Mario Carillo-UA Barcelona and Gemma Dipoppa- Columbia)

Abstract: Forced labor is rising in advanced economies, driven largely by the exploitation of migrants. We examine its political and ideological roots. First, we assemble new data on a historical shock from the Mussolini era and show that it entrenched far-right, ethnophobic ideology in parts of Italy. We support the plausibility of this shock’s persistence using family-level surveys showing that Fascist beliefs were transmitted across generations. Second, we find that areas more exposed to the Fascist legacy exhibit higher levels of migrant forced labor today, with effects intensifying after large migrant inflows, particularly from ethnically discriminated groups. Third, exploitation is greater where Fascist propaganda was more pervasive, where institutions are controlled by far-right parties, and where societal support for the far-right is strongest. These findings underscore the political foundations of contemporary exploitative labor practices.

About the speaker: Shanker Satyanath is a professor in the Department of Politics at New York University.  He works on cross-disciplinary research in Political Science and in Economics, with papers in the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association, and the American Journal of Political Science.  Having worked predominantly on the Political Economy of Conflict in the past, he has recently been focusing more on research in Historical Political Economy. 

 

Center for Public Policy Speaker Series (joint with the Department of Economics Macroeconomics Seminar)

Huberto M. Ennis, Economist in the Research Department of the  Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Date: November 9, 2026

Time: 4:00PM-5:15PM

Location: Room 307,  T2 Building 

Paper title: The Diffusion of Bank Reserves in the U.S.

Abstract: The Federal Reserve implements monetary policy using an ample reserves system, which does not require active management of the total quantity of reserves to maintain interest rate control. The distribution and the diffusion of reserves across banks, and groups of banks, is a key factor in determining the (minimum) ample level of reserves consistent with that objective. If large portions of the outstanding amount of reserves can become effectively “trapped” in segments of the banking system, then the total level of reserves needed to achieve the intended objective may be higher. We propose a Markovian framework to study the weekly flow of reserves across groups of banks between 2010 and 2024. We group banks according to types (foreign and domestic, large and small) and Fed districts. The diffusion process depends on how reserves flow in and out of the system. We compute counterfactuals which shed light on the way the distribution of reserves would adapt to plausible changes in conditions. In general, the distribution of reserves tends to be highly persistent during periods of abundant reserves, but redistribution intensifies when reserves reach lower (yet, still ample) levels.