Matthias Matthijs, Jonas Nahm recognized for scholarly papers

Matthias Matthijs, an assistant professor of international political economy at SAIS, is a recipient of the 2018 Best Paper Award of the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association. "When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility," a paper he co-authored with Mark Blyth, a professor of political economy at Brown University, argues that a specific form of social learning, framed by a retrospective recoding in 2010-12 of Europe's experience with fiscal rules in 2003-2005, drove European elites to pursue policies that were economically irrational but politically rational.

Matthijs says that the paper is relevant for the ongoing elite-level discussions in Europe on how to reform the Eurozone so the continent's single currency can be put on a more stable and sustainable footing when, inevitably, the next crisis comes along.

The paper was presented during the 2017 APSA meetings in San Francisco and published in March 2018 as an article in Perspectives on Politics, one of APSA's top two academic peer-reviewed journals.

Jonas Nahm, an assistant professor of energy, resources, and environment a SAIS, has been awarded the 2017 Gordon White Prize in recognition of an article he published in The China Quarterly. In his report "Exploiting the Implementation Gap: Policy Divergence and Industrial Upgrading in China's Wind and Solar Sectors," Nahm argues that manufacturing policies of Chinese local governments have provided an important corrective to some of the weaknesses inherent in the central government's indigenous innovation framework, most importantly its inattention to the importance of advanced manufacturing capabilities for innovation. Using an original dataset of more than 100 executive interviews conducted with 43 Chinese wind and solar firms, Nahm identifies both central government R&D funding and continued local government support for manufacturing as critical factors in enabling innovation among China's renewable energy firms.

The Gordon White Prize, named in memory of a renowned scholar of modern Chinese politics and society, is awarded annually for the most original article by a scholar published in The China Quarterly, a leading academic journal on contemporary China and Taiwan.