Monica Prasad
Associate Professor of Sociology
Biography
Monica Prasad's areas of interest are economic sociology, comparative historical sociology, and political sociology. Her book The Politics of Free Markets (University of Chicago Press, 2006) won the 2007 Barrington Moore Award. Prasad has also published an edited volume on the sociology of taxation, co-edited with Isaac Martin and Ajay Mehrotra, called The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Her most recent book is The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Prasad is the recipient of several awards including a Fulbright (pdf) to the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris in 2011 and a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies also in 2011. She received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (pdf) in 2009.
Current Research
Comparative Political Economy. Prasad's new book The Land of Too Much develops a demand-side theory of comparative political economy to explain the surprisingly large role of the state in the United States, its origins in the 19th-century revolution in agricultural productivity, and its consequences for undermining a European-style welfare state and leaving U.S. economic growth dependent on "mortgage Keynesianism."
She is currently researching a book manuscript on the Reagan-era tax cut of 1981 (see the related journal article below) and conducting investigations into several aspects of taxation and development with graduate students.
Selected Publications
Books
Prasad, M. 2012. The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty. Harvard University Press.
Martin, I., A. Mehrotra, and M. Prasad, eds. 2009. The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Prasad, M. 2006. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. University of Chicago Press.
Journal Articles
Prasad, M. 2012. The popular origins of neoliberalism in the Reagan tax cut of 1981. Journal of Policy History 24(3): 351–83.
Prasad, M., and S. Munch. 2012 State-level renewable electricity policies and reductions in carbon emissions. Energy Policy 45: 237–42.
Prasad, M., and Y. Deng. 2009. Taxation and the worlds of welfare. Socio-Economic Review 7(3): 431–57.
Prasad, M., with K. Morgan. 2009. The origins of tax systems: A French-American comparison. American Journal of Sociology 14(5): 1350–94.
Prasad, M. 2005. Why is France so French? Culture, institutions, and neoliberalism, 1974–81. American Journal of Sociology 111(2): 357–407.
