Research

ILLEGAL MARKETS

ILLEGAL MARKETS

In economic sociology, scholars have been silent about illegal markets. My research seeks to contribute to the field by both theorizing about these economies in urban contexts and generating interesting fieldwork data. I pay particular attention to emerging social norms, forms of economic coordination and the way demand is structured in illegal markets. My last book Making It at Any Cost: Aspirations and Politics in a Counterfeit Clothing Marketplace is an examination of the vast counterfeit clothing marketplace in Buenos Aires known as La Salada. I spent more than half a year visiting the market and working together with sweatshop owners. Previously, together with my colleague Jens Beckert, I edited the volume The Architecture of Illegal Markets: Towards an Economic Sociology of Illegality in the Economy in which we develop conceptual tools to understand illegality in markets systematically.

I am currently working on two projects. The first one is a research project focused on how different platforms and digital services helped this submerged economy to keep on running during the pandemic and also created further inequalities within the informal garment sector. The second one is focused on drug distribution through encrypted messaging apps.

LAW ENFORCEMENT, GOVERNMENTS AND THE STATE

LAW ENFORCEMENT, GOVERNMENTS AND THE STATE

In social sciences, it is largely assumed that governments and state officials are interested in enforcing the law in markets. This assumption implies explaining cases in which the law is not enforced as a result of the weakness of state agencies or sheer corruption. In both legal and illegal markets, my research has shown that an alternative explanation needs to be considered: that governments may be unwilling to enforce regulations because they pursue interests which require the non-enforcement of the law. In several of my publications this argument is present. My article Illegal Police Protection and the Market for Stolen Vehicles in Buenos Aires shows how police officers, in tandem with politicians, protect auto lifters. I also showed the non-enforcement in the form of an informal taxation system in the article The other taxation: An ethnographic account of “off the books” state financing published in Latin American Research Review and in Domestic obstacles to labor standards: law enforcement and informal institutions in Argentina’s garment industry published in Socio-Economic Review. Along with my colleague Donato Di Carlo, I published Governing through non-enforcement: Regulatory forbearance as industrial policy in advanced economies where we analyze the cases of Germany and Italy in the field of taxation and show the intricate ways through which governments refuse to enforce the law. More recently, together with my colleagues Cornelia Woll and Lucas Ronconi, I further develop this argument on the political economy of law enforcement and provide evidence on different economic fields in the discussion paper The Political Economy of Law Enforcement.