Peter A. Hall

Peter A. Hall is the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at Harvard University and co-Director of CIFAR's Successful Societies Program.  After completing a B.A. in economics and political science at the University of Toronto and an M. Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford, he worked in Ottawa as a parliamentary assistant before taking a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1982.  His books include Governing the Economy, which won the Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book in political science published in 1986, The Political Power of Economic Ideas (1989) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (edited with David Soskice 2001), and Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make (with Pepper Culpepper and Bruno Palier - 2006).  Dr. Hall is the author of over seventy articles on comparative public policy-making, comparative political economy, and institutional analysis, for which he has received several prizes.

Dr. Hall has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations in Paris, the Instituto Juan March in Madrid, and Karl Deutsch Professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin.  He has served as Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, as Chair of the Joint ACLS-SSRC Committee on Western Europe, and he serves on the boards of the Council for European Studies in New York, the European Research Institute at Birmingham, and the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne as well as the editorial boards of ten journals and a major book series.  He has been President of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association and has advised more than sixty doctoral dissertations.

My core research centers on the problem of developing a better understanding of how institutions structure interaction in the political economies of the developed democracies.  I am exploring the contention that the efficiency of economic operations in some spheres of the economy is affected by 'institutional complementarities' with other spheres, such that the effects of labor market reform depend on the institutional structures for corporate governance in the nation, and I am seeking better concepts and measures with which to assess the institutional differences across 'varieties of capitalism'.

I am also embarking on a major effort to place current debates about 'globalization' in a larger historical context, by comparing national responses to increasing international economic interdependence at three key moments in the post-war years, 1958-63, 1968-73, and 1998-2003.  My focus is on the distributive implications of the response, i.e. who wins and who loses from it.  The premise is that increasing flows of goods or capital across national borders inspire demands for social protection and pressure for economic flexibility.  Taking public and private sector decisions as components of the reaction, I am exploring the nature of each national adjustment path and its determinants in four European nations.

Finally, I am also writing a series of essays about the methodology of social science designed to devise new techniques for studying the more complex chains of causation in the social world that recent social science has identified.  These include efforts to illuminate the role of culture in conventional rational choice analyses.