The Douglass North Best Book Award
Angela Zhang (USC Law), High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs its Economy
High Wire provides an incredibly nuanced account of how China regulates its economy. Contrary to popular accounts in which the Chinese government controls the economy with an iron fist, High Wire shows how decentralized decision-making plays a central role in how firms and the government act and react to new regulations.
This book is at the heart of what might be called "SIOE research." It shows that formal rules often do not drive organizational incentives or even government actions. It further shows that institutional constraints help guide what a government can do, but that firms and government actors experiment within the boundaries set by those institutions.
Zhang's work applies these insights to one of the most important — if not misunderstood — political economy settings: present-day China. High Wire provides fundamentally new insights into many literatures: institutional theory, organizational theory, informal legal systems, and Chinese political economy. It is sure to be an important manuscript in all these literatures for years to come, and it is a worthy winner of the Douglass North Book Award.
Runners-up:
Jenny Guardado (Georgetown SFS), The Venal Origins of Development in Spanish America
The Venal Origins of Development in Spanish America asks a big question at the heart of long-run economic development: why have the former Spanish colonies fared so poorly since independence? A question also asked by Douglass North, Guardado argues that the answer lies in how the Spanish bureaucracy was formed. The Spanish sold offices, which allowed for exploitative practices to arise under the Spanish and persist after independence. Guardado combines extensive data collection with narrative evidence to trace how the Spanish colonial legacy impacts political and economic development in modern Latin America.
Martin J. Williams (UMich Org Studies), Reform as Process: Implementing Change in Public Bureaucracies
Reform as Process asks why bureaucratic reforms so often fail, even when they are well intentioned or well designed. Williams brings together narrative evidence, interviews, and data from six African countries to support his argument that reforms fail when they focus on formal institutions but not the day-to-day of how bureaucracies actually work. Williams suggests that reforms must leverage localized knowledge to be successful — what has worked in the past, what has not, adaptation to hyper-local context, how individual bureaucrats learn through social interaction, and so forth. This is a book in the SIOE wheelhouse, as it hits at the heart of what makes organizations efficient and what can limit their capabilities.
Committee: Jared Rubin (Chapman University, chair), Jenna Bednar (University of Michigan), Jeff Jenkins (USC), Marta Reynal-Querol (Pompeu Fabra)
The Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award
Matteo Tranchero (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), "The Role of Data in the Search for Innovation: Essays on Big Data Genomics" (UC Berkeley Haas, 2024)
Tranchero's dissertation delivers genuinely non-obvious answers to a first-order question: when does big data help or hinder innovation? The three chapters are impressive and make up a coherent body of work.
The first shows that genome-wide association studies stimulate pharmaceutical investment but generate substantial misallocation toward false positives. The second demonstrates that domain knowledge is amplified rather than displaced by data, helping firms avoid false positives and focus on the best opportunities. The third formalizes a "streetlight effect" wherein attractive-but-suboptimal data paradoxically narrows exploration and suppresses breakthrough discovery — validated theoretically, experimentally, and empirically.
The committee also wishes to recognize the two other finalists, whose dissertations were of exceptional quality and made the selection genuinely difficult.
Other finalists:
Deivy Houeix, "Essays on Firms and Technology in Development Economics" (MIT, 2025)
Through three field experiments in West Africa, combining contract theory, large-scale randomization, and novel network data, Houeix delivers causal evidence on how small firms adopt and diffuse new technologies — and how digital tools reshape firm relationships and market access. Houeix's dissertation is both ambitious in scope, rigorous in execution, and influential in practice.
Sukrit Singh Puri, "Essays on Business and Politics in India" (MIT, 2025)
Puri shows how family involvement shapes corporate political donations along ethnic lines, provides an empirical account of dark money in Indian politics by exploiting a unique natural experiment that retroactively exposed anonymous donors, and reveals how state electoral cycles reshape firms' long-run investment strategies. Puri's dissertation makes creative, rigorous, and important contributions to political economy, illuminating the social and political foundations of firm behavior in the world's largest democracy.
Committee: Virginia Minni (University of Chicago Booth School of Business, chair), Vasiliki Fouka (Stanford University), Benjamin Marx (Boston University), Sara Lowes (University of California San Diego)