Garry Piepenbrock

Garry Piepenbrock is double majoring in honors economics and honors political science with a minor in mathematics. He has served as a Research Assistant in many of Stanford’s economics and political science research centers including: the Hoover Institution, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), the King Center on Global Development, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Graduate School of Business. He is writing three different honors theses in economics, political science and democracy, development and the rule of law (DDRL) in which he is developing different aspects of a theory of the evolution of the global political economy. His research models how capital and labor co-create and distribute the wealth of nations and how this impacts the evolution of global competition between liberal market economies like the US, UK and India and coordinated market economies like Japan, Germany and China. He has received multiple awards and grants for this research which he has presented and/or published in conferences around the world (London, Chicago, Vienna, Budapest, Lille, Bilbao and Boston). He would like to undertake a PhD in political economy and ultimately work in academia and public service.

Ronald I. McKinnon Memorial Fellowship for Undergraduates | 2024 - 2025 Academic Year

Toward a Theory of the Evolution of the Global Political Economy: How Capital and Labor Interact to Co-create and Distribute Wealth within and between Nations

Garry’s research develops a political economic model which explains cross-country variation in economic efficiency and equality by including capital and labor, not just as factors of production, but as political-economic institutions which interact to co-create and distribute wealth both within and between nations. A dynamic structural model is constructed which captures labor tolerance to inequality and capital sensitivity to redistributive tax. These parameters are estimated using national data from the median voter theory and tax elasticities respectively. The equations of motion for the transitional dynamics are expressed as a system of nonlinear differential equations which are solved by numerical simulation.