Datasets

IMF Executive Board Minutes (complete)

When, why, how, and to what effect do state actors participate in global financial governance? Together with Dan Honig and Alexandros Kentikelenis, we collected new data on debates in the decision-making body of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—the IMF Executive Board—which allows scholars to pursue such questions. Our dataset systematizes all comments from Executive Board members over 3,111 formal developing-country-specific discussions held between 1995 and 2015, primarily on the topics of lending and economic surveillance. We identify all attendees in these negotiations, and extract the full text of more than 70,000 comments from the IMF Executive Board Minutes.

The full text corpus is available on the Harvard Dataverse.

IFI Leader Speeches (ongoing)

How do international financial institutions (IFIs) respond to climate change? To answer this question, I am compiling a new text corpus with speeches by the leaders of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. The text corpus currently includes the transcripts of 1,599 speeches delivered between 2010 and 2023. I am currently updating the data and extending the sample to include additional regional development banks. Ultimately, this text corpus enables scholars of international organizations to provide a more comprehensive picture of picture of IFI decision-making and governance by studying an underappreciated actor in international politics: the leaders that mediate between state interests and bureaucrats, while also potentially exercising independent influence.

World Health Assembly Records (ongoing)

Who engages in global health governance? In an ongoing project with Ben Christian, Mirko Heinzel, and Lisbeth Zimmermann, we study the attendance and participation of state delegates in the main decision-making body of the World Health Organization—the annual World Health Assembly (WHA). To this end, we are constructing a new database on the size, specialization, and participation of national delegations in the WHA between 2000 and 2022, including the transcripts from more than 20,000 speeches by state representatives, WHO officials, and non-state delegates. Our data will allow scholars to study agenda-setting and decision-making in arguably the most important venue of global health policy-making.