The LPE Project is hosting Zoom-based conversations with leading scholars throughout the summer (full schedule & details still coming soon!). Our second event will take place, June 24th at 8pm ET with Ganesh Sitaraman, Morgan Ricks, and Christopher Serkin, discussing their forthcoming article “Regulation and the Geography of Inequality.” In it, they argue that the dominant explanations for widening geographic inequality focusing largely on inexorable economic trends leave out a crucial factor: the effects of specific regulatory choices on economic geography. They argue regulatory policies in the areas of transportation, communications, trade, and antitrust helped construct an era of geographic convergence in the mid-twentieth century, and that deregulation in those same areas contributed to the rise of geographic inequality over the last generation. They then make the case for reincorporating geographic factors into federal regulatory policymaking as a means of combating rising geographic inequality.
This is a read-ahead event (the article is available here), the authors will speak briefly at the beginning of the workshop but then go straight into Q&A. Please register via this Google form and a zoom link will be distributed the morning of the event.