John S. Ahlquist’s research while affiliated with University of California System and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (75)


The Effects of Import Competition on Unionization
  • Article

November 2023

·

20 Reads

·

8 Citations

American Economic Journal Economic Policy

John S. Ahlquist

·

Mitch Downey

We study direct and indirect effects of Chinese import competition on union membership in the United States, 1990–2014. Import competition in manufacturing induced a modest decline in unionization within manufacturing industries. The magnitude is small because unionized manufacturers competed in higher-quality product segments. Manufacturers in right-to-work states experienced more direct competition with low-quality Chinese imports. Outside of manufacturing, however, import competition causes an important increase in union membership, as less educated women shift away from retail and toward jobs in health care and education where unions are stronger. We calculate that Chinese imports prevented 26 percent of the union density decline that would have otherwise occurred. (JEL F14, F16, J16, J51, L60, P33)



Work and Workers in International Markets

July 2021

·

3 Reads

·

1 Citation

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.


The Bangladeshi RMG sector (UNCTAD 2018)
Relative risk of signing the Accord or Alliance for a change in covariates Note: Solid points have 95% confidence intervals that do not contain 1
Firm participation in voluntary regulatory initiatives: The Accord, Alliance, and US garment importers from Bangladesh
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

April 2021

·

266 Reads

·

35 Citations

The Review of International Organizations

Most research on private governance examines the design and negotiation of particular initiatives or their operation and effectiveness once established, with relatively little work on why firms join in the first place. We contribute to this literature by exploring firms’ willingness to participate in two recent, high-profile private initiatives established in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster in the Bangladesh ready-made garment (RMG) sector: the Accord on Building and Fire Safety and the Alliance for Worker Safety in Bangladesh. Using novel shipment-level data from U.S. customs declarations, we generate a set of firms that were “eligible” to join these remediation initiatives. We are able to positively attribute only a minority of US RMG imports from Bangladesh to Accord and Alliance signatories. Firms with consumer-facing brands, publicly-traded firms, and those importing more RMG product from Bangladesh were more likely to sign up for the Accord and Alliance. Firms headquartered in the USA were much less likely to sign onto remediation plans, especially the Accord.

View access options

The Political Consequences of External Economic Shocks: Evidence from Poland: EXTERNAL ECONOMIC SHOCKS

February 2020

·

104 Reads

·

73 Citations

American Journal of Political Science

How do external economic shocks influence domestic politics? We argue that those materially exposed to the shock will display systematic differences in policy preferences and voting behavior compared to the unexposed, and political parties can exploit these circumstances. Empirically, we take advantage of the 2015 surprise revaluation of the Swiss franc to identify the Polish citizens with direct economic exposure to this exogenous event. Using an original survey fielded prior to the 2015 elections and an embedded survey experiment, we show that exposed individuals were more likely to demand government support and more likely to desert the government and vote for the largest opposition party, which was able to use the shock to expand its electoral coalition without alienating its core voters. Our article clarifies the connection between international shocks, voters’ policy preferences, partisan policy responses, and, ultimately, voting decisions.







Citations (37)


... These factors influence a country's relative advantage and are pivotal in establishing its products' appeal and accessibility on an international scale [39,40]. National-level competitiveness research aims to understand how macroeconomic and policy environments shape overall export performance, providing insights into economic policy's impact on international trade [41]. ...

Reference:

The Impact of Digital Trade on the Export Competitiveness of Enterprises—An Empirical Analysis Based on Listed Companies in the Yangtze River Economic Belt
The Effects of Import Competition on Unionization
  • Citing Article
  • November 2023

American Economic Journal Economic Policy

... If we instead view charisma as resulting from interactions, we can give equal weight to personalities, settings, and expectations; we can be honest about the benefits and risks of various organizational structures. Cultural theorist Alberto Melucci (1996) also understood leadership as exchanges between leaders and followers, but he thought what was being exchanged was a more limited set of costs and benefits (Ahlquist & Levi, 2013). Leaders are the core of two dilemmas that all organizations face: the pyramid dilemma, over how steep a hierarchy to construct, and the organization dilemma, over how rigidly to follow formal rules instead of being flexible. ...

In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social Activism
  • Citing Book
  • January 2014

... Second, research has demonstrated that the number of social movement organizations is strongly associated with other measures of movement strength, such as the number of nonviolent protests (e.g., Murdie & Bhasin, 2011). Third, the majority of social movement activities are carried out by formal organizations rather than individuals and informal groups (e.g., Ahlquist & Levi, 2013), further bolstering the validity of our measure. ...

In the Interest of Others: Organizations and Social ActivismOrganizations and Social Activism
  • Citing Book
  • September 2013

... Additionally, another GLMM using Gaussian error distribution, was employed to examine the associations between average egg volume and female body mass, including the Year as a random effect as well. The p values of the GLMMs were calculated using the Wald test (Ward and Ahlquist 2018). The daily survival rate (DSR) of the nests was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier curve (Sedgwick 2014), which described the proportion of nests that survived within the given time interval relative to the total nests. ...

2 - Theory and Properties of Maximum Likelihood Estimators
  • Citing Chapter
  • November 2018

... A financial crisis tends to put pressure on debtors, which in turn leads to political conflicts (Gyöngösi and Verner 2022). One study, for instance, found that financial stress among homeowners was related to the rise of right-wing populism in Poland (Ahlquist et al. 2020). We have obtained the data for this variable from the Swedish wealth register. ...

The Political Consequences of External Economic Shocks: Evidence from Poland: EXTERNAL ECONOMIC SHOCKS
  • Citing Article
  • February 2020

American Journal of Political Science

... However, most developing countries' exports are labor-intensive, utilizing both unskilled and semi-skilled labor (Islam, 2023). Low productivity is one of the significant issues facing Bangladeshi RMG (Ahlquist & Mosley, 2021;Akter, 2020;Bair et al., 2020;Das et al., 2018). According to "the Asian Productivity Organization (2022)", Bangladesh's worker productivity per hour is lower than that of the other countries that export RMGs. ...

Firm participation in voluntary regulatory initiatives: The Accord, Alliance, and US garment importers from Bangladesh

The Review of International Organizations

... For a random variable X depending on a trait parameter θ, the Fisher's information I(θ) measures the information X provides about θ ( [2]). Since its introduction ( [3]), the Fisher's information has been widely applied, including in Bayesian statistics ( [4]), to derive the Wald's test ( [5]), to estimate Cramér-Rao bounds ( [6,7]), in optimal experimental design ( [8]), in machine learning ( [9]), and in epidemiology ( [10]), just to name some. Notably, it connects to relative entropy (or Kullback-Leibler divergence), as the Fisher's information represents the Hessian of relative entropy with respect to θ. ...

Maximum Likelihood for Social Science: Strategies for Analysis
  • Citing Book
  • November 2018

... Despite studies of actual investigations and prosecutions that indicate that voter fraud occurs very infrequently in the United States (e.g., Minnite 2010;Ahlquist et al., 2014;Christensen and Schultz 2014;Ansolabehere et al. 2015;Cottrell et al.,2018), one-quarter to one-third of Americans believe that voter fraud occurs frequently (Wilson and Brewer 2013;Stewart, et al. 2016). ...

Alien Abduction and Voter Impersonation in the 2012 U.S. General Election: Evidence from a Survey List Experiment
  • Citing Article
  • December 2014

Election Law Journal Rules Politics and Policy

... The central question of this article is whether the invocation of autocratic legalism can change public perceptions of regime behavior, and whether this effect is conditioned by partisanship. In the context of competitive elections, there is now a large literature that has demonstrated the role of partisanmotivated reasoning in assessing government performance (Bartels 2002;Taber and Lodge 2006;Gerber and Huber 2010), supporting illicit behavior like corruption (Anduiza, Gallego, and Munõz 2013;Blais, Gidengil, and Kilibarda 2017), and antidemocratic lawmaking (Ahlquist et al. 2018;Graham and Svolik 2020). Our expectation is that due to this bias, partisans are likely to respond to autocratic legalism in opposite directions. ...

How Do Voters Perceive Changes to the Rules of the Game? Evidence from the 2014 Hungarian Elections
  • Citing Article
  • January 2018

Journal of Comparative Economics

... We include state of residence in each model as an indicator variable, thereby imposing the same age relationship in each of the two states (except for a state-ofresidence level shift). We use a linear estimator because, although it is less efficient than a maximum likelihood estimator, it has reduced bias when incidence is low (Ahlquist, 2018;Blair et al., 2019). Because we are using a linear regression, the coefficient multiplied by 100 represents the percentage-point change in abortion incidence with a one unit increase in the predictor variable. ...

List Experiment Design, Non-Strategic Respondent Error, and Item Count Technique Estimators
  • Citing Article
  • December 2017

Political Analysis