Faculty & Research
Gunnar Trumbull

Gunnar Trumbull

Philip Caldwell Professor of Business Administration

Philip Caldwell Professor of Business Administration

Business, Government and the International Economy
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Gunnar Trumbull
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(617) 495-6326
Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors

Gunnar Trumbull is a Professor at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy area. Trumbull graduated from Harvard College in 1991 and earned a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. in 2000. He joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 2001, where his research focuses on European political economy.

Trumbull's core interest is with consumer politics. He is author of Consumer Credit in Postwar America and France: The Political Construction of Economic Interest (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which explores the politics and business of consumer lending over the 20th century. In it, he argues that the benign practices of early U.S. retail lenders led Americans to see consumer lending as a viable response to growing inequality. His other works include Strength in Numbers: The Political Power of Weak Interests (Harvard University Press, 2012), in which he argues that diffuse groups like consumers are more powerful, and industry less influential, than we commonly assume; and Consumer Capitalism: Politics, Product Markets, and Firm Strategy in France and Germany (Cornell University Press, 2006), which explores the political roots of consumer protection policies that emerged in France and Germany beginning in the 1970s.

Trumbull also conducts research on technology policy. His book Silicon and the State: French Innovation Policy in the Internet Age (Brookings Press, 2004) traces France's policy response in the late-1990s to the apparent success of the Silicon Valley model of technology innovation.
Featured Work
Consumer Lending in France and America
Credit and Welfare
Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces the historical emergence of modern consumer lending in America and France. If Americans were profligate in their borrowing, the French were correspondingly frugal. Comparison of the two countries reveals that America's love affair with credit was not primarily the consequence of its culture of consumption, as many writers have observed, nor directly a consequences of its less generous welfare state. It emerged instead from evolving coalitions between fledgling consumer lenders seeking to make their business socially acceptable and a range of non-governmental groups working to promote public welfare, labor, and minority rights. In France, where a similar coalition did not emerge, consumer credit continued to be perceived as economically regressive and socially risky.
Strength in Numbers: The Political Power of Weak Interests

Many consumers feel powerless in the face of big industry’s interests. And the dominant view of economic regulators (influenced by Mancur Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action, published in 1965) agrees with them. According to this view, diffuse interests like those of consumers are too difficult to organize and too weak to influence public policy, which is determined by the concentrated interests of industrial-strength players. Gunnar Trumbull makes the case that this view represents a misreading of both the historical record and the core logic of interest representation. Weak interests, he reveals, quite often emerge the victors in policy battles.

Based on a cross-national set of empirical case studies focused on the consumer, retail, credit, pharmaceutical, and agricultural sectors, Strength in Numbers develops an alternative model of interest representation. The central challenge in influencing public policy, Trumbull argues, is not organization but legitimation. How do diffuse consumer groups convince legislators that their aims are more legitimate than industry’s? By forging unlikely alliances among the main actors in the process: activists, industry, and regulators. Trumbull explains how these “legitimacy coalitions” form around narratives that tie their agenda to a broader public interest, such as expanded access to goods or protection against harm. Successful legitimizing tactics explain why industry has been less powerful than is commonly thought in shaping agricultural policy in Europe and pharmaceutical policy in the United States. In both instances, weak interests carried the day.

Consumer Capitalism: Politics, Product Markets, and Firm Strategy in France and Germany
"The unfettered marketplace, in which uncertainty rules and the admonition caveat emptor ('let the buyer beware') dictates each consumer decision, has today virtually disappeared. Consumers have become the focus of intensive economic policymaking designed to protect them from the risks and disappointments of the market. . . . Today, arguably no other economic actor in the advanced industrial countries—not the investor, not the worker, not the welfare recipient—enjoys a more thorough set of legal and institutional protections than the modern consumer when he or she enters the corner store."—from the Introduction

Gunnar Trumbull investigates the origins of national systems of consumer protection in France and Germany, where, in the early 1970s, consumer groups and producers organized to advance their own ideas about the identity and interests of the affluent consumer. Through a comparison of eight areas of policy—product liability law, product safety standards and recall, misleading advertising, comparative product tests, product labeling, quality standards, consumer contracts, and pricing—Trumbull shows that different conceptions of the consumer interest emerged in the two countries. The result was the development of distinctive national consumption regimes, which have in turn influenced the market strategies of domestic producers.

Trumbull's findings help to clarify distinctive national approaches to recent product crises—including cases of BSE and genetically modified foods. His research suggests that, in the age of consumer capitalism, national competitiveness may hinge not only on endowments of labor and capital, but also on the institutional forms of national consumption.

Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Trumbull, J. Gunnar. "Banking on Consumer Credit: Explaining Patterns of Household Borrowing in the United States and France." Chap. 7 in The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective: Business, Regulation, and Culture, edited by Jan Logemann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. View Details
  • Trumbull, J. Gunnar. "Consumer Policy: Business and the Politics of Consumption." Chap. 26 in The Oxford Handbook of Business and Government, edited by David Coen, Wyn Grant, and Graham Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. View Details
  • Trumbull, J. Gunnar. "Between Global and Local: The Invention of Data Privacy in the United States and France." In The Voice of the Citizen Consumer, edited by K. Bruckweh. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011. View Details
  • Trumbull, Gunnar. "The Surprise of Collective Action: Consumer Mobilization in France, 1970-1985." In Affluence and Activism: Organized Consumers in the Post-War Era, edited by Even Lange and Iselin Theien. Oslo: Unipub, 2004. View Details
  • Trumbull, Gunnar. "Strategies of Consumer Group Mobilization." In Material Politics: The State and Consumer Society, edited by Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton. Oxford: Berg, 2000. View Details
  • Trumbull, Gunnar. "Divergent Paths of Product Market Regulation in France and Germany, 1970-1990." In Global Political Economy: Among and Within Nations, edited by Stuart S. Nagel. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2000. View Details
  • Trumbull, Gunnar, Anne Wren, Bob Hancke, and David Soskice. "Wage Bargaining, Labour Markets and Macroeconomic Performance in the Netherlands." In The German and Dutch Economies: Who Follows Whom? edited by Lei Delsen and Eelke de Jong. New York: Physica-Verlag, 1998. View Details
Working Papers
Cases and Teaching Materials
Other Publications and Materials
  • Trumbull, J. Gunnar. "Europe and Globalization: Report Prepared for the National Intelligence Council." December 2000. View Details
Research Summary
The Politics of Consumer Credit
A combination of factors has dramatically increased consumer access to and reliance upon credit across the OECD. These factors include financial liberalization and deregulation, improvements in consumer credit information and its analysis, and a growth in debt securitization. Yet this period of unprecedented credit access has coincided with a decline in average real wages. National governments have responded by enacting new regulations governing consumer bankruptcy, financial data privacy, consumer advocacy, and interest rate caps. This project traces the politics of consumer credit regulation in France, Germany and Britain during the postwar period.
The Political Power of Weak Interests

One of the most broadly accepted theoretical claims of public policy is the proposal that interests shared by a large set of actors tend to be under-represented in public policy. From Mancur Olson to George Stigler to James Q. Wilson, our most influential theorists of organization and public policy argue that diffuse interests must therefore be weak interests. The logic of their case is familiar and compelling. Large numbers of individuals are difficult to organize. And when the benefits of organization cannot be excluded from the general public, individuals will have insufficient incentives to support a collective lobbying effort. These coordination problems make organizing diffuse interests a harder job than organizing concentrated interests. Yet everywhere we look, diffuse interests are strongly represented. Consumers have benefited from progressive trade liberalization. Competition policy has broken apart concentrated producers with monopoly pricing power. Modern retailing has given rural consumer access to an extraordinary variety of products at extremely low prices. Small shareholders enjoy powerful legal protections against manipulation by powerful block-holders.

This book project explores why diffuse interests are so heavily represented in public policy, and why narrow interest groups that subvert more diffuse economic or social interests do so at their peril. Through a study of policies in agriculture, pharmaceuticals, retailing, and consumer credit, I explore how diffuse interest come to be represented, and the strategies that concentrated industry interests employ to achieve their interests.

The Politics of Food
This project explores the origins and evolution of national food cultures, emphasizing the sources of variation in terms of quality, safety, and 'sophistication'. Comparing food cultures in postwar Italy, France, and America, I argue that distinctive national patterns of food production and consumption have their roots in the differential ability of small producers and distributors to protect themselves against powerful agricultural, industrial and distribution interests. The product will be a book-length manuscript entitled: "Good Food, Bad Food." 
Awards & Honors
Received the 2016 Charles M. Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Received the 2014 HBS Student Association Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum.
Received the 2013 HBS Student Association Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum.
Received the 2016 HBS Student Association Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum.
Received the 2013 Charles M. Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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