Sarah Quinn's American Bonds Wins Two Major Awards

Submitted by Ari Asercion on

Professor Sarah Quinn's book, American Bonds How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation, has been recognized with the Viviana Zelizer Award for Best Book in Economic Sociology and the Alice Amsden Best Book Award from the Society of Socio-Economics. American Bonds also received Honorable Mention for the Theory Prize from the Theory Section of the ASA.

 In American Bonds, Quinn documents the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs throughout US history, and reveals how the federal government has used financial markets to manage and maintain complex social divisions through the present time.  Members of the Zelizer Award committee commented that the book:

"...makes a serious case that the sociology of credit institutions should be at the core of any macro-level economic sociology."

"It connects its analysis of markets and finance with the production of structural inequalities in a new way that has great potential to political economy scholars, postcolonial scholars, and those interested in the structural and historical backdrops of predatory inclusion. Deeply historical, but still completely relevant to contemporary economic sociology questions."

"The theoretical approach on credit as a time machine...can be turned into a comparative research program at multiple scales of analysis."  

"Given we are entering a great depression in the US, where the role of credit institutions in the social contract are going to be politicized to a large degree compared to the previous generation, this book [shows] that economic sociology can get at big and relevant questions."

"...a touchstone—the kind of thing that literally anyone studying American credit will have to read and cite, for at least the next three or four decades, until time renders it out of date."

Read an interview with Sarah about her book here.

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