You may not know this, but the US imposes a 12.5 percent import tariff on imported flashlights. However, for a product category defined by the federal government as “portable electric lamps designed to be powered by their own energy source, other than flashlights,” the import tariff is only 3.5 percent .
At a glance, it seems incomprehensible. Why is one type of self-powered portable light taxed more heavily than another? According to MIT political science professor In Song Kim, a policy difference like this often stems from differences in the political power of companies, as well as the extent to which companies are empowered. in global production networks. This is a topic that Kim has spent years exploring in detail, producing original scholarly results while unlocking a wealth of data about public politics.
“We all understand companies to be important economic agents,” Kim said. “But companies are political agents, too. They are very important political actors.
In particular, Kim’s work illuminates the effects of lobbying on US trade policy. International trade is often presented as an unvarnished good, opening up markets and boosting growth. Furthermore, trade issues are often described at the industry level; we hear about the preferences of the agricultural lobby or the automobile industry. But in reality, different companies want different things, even within the same industry.
As Kim’s work shows, most companies lobby for policies related to specific ingredients in their products, and trade policy consists of many carve-outs for companies, not standards. across the industry. Companies that make non-flashlight portable lights, seem to be good at lobbying, but the benefits are clearly not carried by all portable light makers, as long as the products are not completely substitutes for each other. Meanwhile, as Kim’s research also shows, lobbying can help companies grow faster in size, even if lobbying-influenced policies can slow down the economy as a whole.
“All our current theories suggest that trade policy is a public good, in the sense that the benefits of open trade, the gains from trade, are enjoyed by the public and benefit the nation as a whole, ” said Kim. “But what I’ve learned is that trade policies are very broad. It became clear to me that trade is no longer a public good. It’s actually a private good for individual companies.”
Kim’s work includes more than a dozen published journal articles in the past few years, several other forthcoming research papers, and a book he is currently writing. At the same time, Kim created a public database, LobbyView, which tracks US political money since 1999. LobbyView, as an important collection of political information, has research, educational, and application of the public interest, which enables others, in academia or outside it, to further investigate the subject.
“I want to contribute to the community of scholars, and I also want to create a public [resource] for our MIT community [and beyond]so that we can all learn politics through this,” said Kim.
Stay well in public
Kim grew up in South Korea, in an environment where politics is at the center of everyday life. Kim’s grandfather, Kim jae-soon, was the Speaker of the National Assembly of South Korea from 1988 to 1990 and was an important figure in the country’s government.
“I always enjoyed politics,” said Kim, who remembers famous politicians visiting the family home when he was a child. One of the main lessons Kim learned about politics from his grandfather, however, was not about proximity to power, but the importance of public service. The lasting lesson of his family’s involvement in politics, Kim says, is that “I really believe in contributing to the public good.”
Kim found his own way to contribute to the public good not as a politician but as a political scholar. Kim received his BA in political science from Yonsei University in Seoul but decided he wanted to pursue graduate studies in the U.S. He earned an MA in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Tufts University, then an MA in political science at George Washington University. During this time, Kim became focused on quantitative analysis of trade policy; for his PhD work, he attended Princeton University and was awarded his doctorate in 2014, joining the MIT faculty that year.
Among the key pieces of research published by Kim, a paper, “Political Cleavages within Industry: Firm-level Lobbying for Trade Liberalization,” published in American Political Science Review and growing out of his dissertation research, helped show how unique many trade policies are. As of 2017, the US has almost 17,000 types of products that are subject to these tariff decisions. Many of these are component parts of a product; about two-thirds of international trade consists of manufactured components that are sent around during the production process, rather than raw products or finished products. That paper won the 2018 Michael Wallerstein Award for the best published article in political economy last year.
Another 2017 paper co-authored by Kim, “The Charmed Life of Superstar Exporters,” from Journal of Politics, provides more empirical evidence of differences among firms within an industry. The “superstar” companies that are the biggest exporters tend to lobby the most about trade politics; A firm’s characteristics reveal more about its preferences for open trade than the likelihood that its industry as a whole will gain a comparative advantage internationally.
Kim regularly uses big data and computational methods to study international trade and trade politics. Another paper he co-authored, “Measuring Trade Profiles with Product Granular Level Sales Data,” published in American Journal of Political Science in 2020, tracks trade relations in more specific terms. Looking at more than 2 billion observations of international trade data, Kim developed an algorithm to group countries based on the products they import and export. The approach helps researchers learn about the very different development paths that countries follow, and about the deepening international competition between countries like the US and China.
At other times, Kim examines who influences trade policy. His paper “Mapping Political Communities,” from the journal Political Analysis in 2021, looks at the US Congress and uses mandatory reports filed by lobbyists to create a picture of which interest groups are most closely connected to politicians.
Kim published all of his papers while balancing his scholarly research and the public launch of LobbyView, which took place in 2018. He was awarded tenure at MIT in the spring of 2022. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and is a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
By the book
Kim continues to explore firm-level lobbying dynamics, although his recent research has run in several directions. In a 2021 working paper, Kim and co-author Federico Huneeus of the Central Bank of Chile built a model that estimated that eliminating US lobbying could raise productivity by up to 6 percent.
“Political rents [favorable policies] provided by particular companies may indicate inefficiencies or a misallocation of economic resources,” Kim said. “You could allocate resources to more productive although not politically active companies, but now they are given to less productive but politically active large companies, increasing market concentration and monopolies.”
Kim is on sabbatical in the 2022-23 academic year, working on a book about the importance of companies’ political activities in making trade policy. The book has a wide timeframe, dating back to ancient times, which emphasizes the importance of trade policy in those times. At the same time, the book will analyze the distinctive features of modern trade politics with deepening global production networks.
“I try to let people learn about the history of trade politics, to show how politics has changed over time,” Kim said. “In doing so, I also emphasize the importance of firm-to-firm trade and the emergence of new trade coalitions between companies in different countries and industries linked through the global production chain.”
While continuing his own scholarly research, Kim still leads LobbyView, which he sees as a great data resource for any scholar interested in money in politics and an excellent resource for teaching for his classes at MIT, as students can tap into it for projects and papers. LobbyView has a lot of data, in fact, so part of the challenge is finding ways to mine it effectively.
“It offered me an opportunity to work with students at MIT,” Kim said of LobbyView. “What I think I can contribute is bringing technology to our understanding of politics. Having this unique data set will really allow students here to use technology to learn about politics, and I think that’s a good fit.” that’s the birth of MIT.”