Dennis Quinn: McDonough School of Business

Every week a business school professor, an expert in his or her field, defines a key term on FT Lexicon, our online economics, business and finance glossary.

Our professor this week

Dennis Quinn professor of economics at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, is an expert in business, public policy and international political economy.

Since first joining McDonough in 1987, Prof Quinn has been published in many academic journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Review of Financial Studies, and Administrative Science Quarterly. Prof Quinn has been honoured for his research focusing on democratisation and economic liberalisation in emerging markets, the origins and consequences of international financial liberalisation, globalisation and international political economy.

In 2013, Prof Quinn was the co-recipient of the 2013 Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in the field of political economy from 2012. Awarded by the political economy section of the American Political Science Association, Prof Quinn and co-author John Freeman of Minnesota were recognised for the 2012 research, The Economic Origins of Democracy Reconsidered.

Prof Quinn’s study examined the last 40 years, as democratic forms of government spread worldwide, including to poor, highly divided or highly unequal countries long thought to be infertile ground for democracy. In this study, Prof Quinn argues that financial integration enables elites in non-democratic governments to diversify their assets internationally. This diversification decreases both elite stakes in, and elite collective action capacity for, opposing democracy. Financially integrated non-democracies, especially those with high levels of inequality, are likely to democratise because elites, having moved their assets overseas, are less willing to pay the costs of maintaining dictatorships.

Previously, Prof Quinn studied the hazards of high status; assessing measures of financial openness and integration; ideology and voter preferences as determinants of financial globalisation, among others. His research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the International Monetary Fund.

Prof Quinn earned his PhD in political science at Columbia University. He currently serves on the Georgetown University committee on rank and tenure, and previously served the university as assistant provost for international development.

Prof Quinn has chosen to define economic globalisation.

Why Prof Quinn believes it is important to understand economic globalisation

“With economic globalisation, the citizens of Appalachian and Welsh Cambrian towns alike are shaken, for good and ill, by the business advances of global firms including those from China and India,” says Prof Quinn.

“A failure to understand the origins and consequences of economic globalisation increases a firm’s, a town’s, a county’s, a region’s and a country’s chances of economic and political irrelevance.”

To find out more about economic globalisation, click on the hyperlinked terms.