Marnie Ginis

Marnie Ginis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research spans international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of industrial policy. She is particularly interested in how institutions affect firms’ industrial upgrading decisions. Her dissertation, titled Production Complexity as Extraction Protection: State-Firm Interactions in a Globalized World, explores how rising global production complexity has changed the nature of interactions between states and firms. She argues that states have a “toolbox” of different asset extraction techniques, that firms have a corresponding toolbox of techniques with which to protect themselves, and that rising global production complexity has expanded these toolboxes on both sides. Ginis hypothesizes that firms facing a greater threat of asset extraction will maintain or shift to more complex production processes, and that states take this into account when designing their asset extraction strategies. She uses a variety of methods to test this hypothesis, including firm-level survey experiments, interviews, and case studies in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and China. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research institution in Washington DC. Ginis received her B.A. and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan in May 2017 with a double major in Political Science (highest honors) and Economics.