Sarah Quinn

Writings on Securitization and Related Topics

Things of Shreds and Patches: Credit Aid, the Budget, and Securitization in America (Working Paper). This paper explores how government programs in the postwar era helped spur the turn to MBS in the late 1960s. In addition to connecting the history of MBS to the history of budget politics and federal credit policies, this paper highlighs how the U.S. government used credit programs to quietly intervene in its markets in the post-war era.

The Credit Mines (Contexts, 2010). A review of two books on the credit and housing bubbles, Alyssa Katz's Our Lot and Charles Geisst's Collateral Damaged.

Lemon Socialism and Securitization (Trajectories, Spring 2009). Public risks and private profits are not just a consequence of securitization; they are also a cause.

Securitization and the State (Conference Paper, ASA 2008). Government involvement in the securitization market is considered in view of examples from the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. 

 

 

 

Other Work

• The Transformation of Morals in Markets (American Journal of Sociology, November 2008). How institutions have shaped ideas about the morality of buying life insurance policies from strangers.
• Blue Chip Bodies with Lynne Gerber (Bodily Inscriptions, 2008). In this paper we analyze claims about fatness made by three famous people with very different social positions: Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Spurlock, and Pat Robertson. We use these examples and Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital to discuss the cultural economy of body size in America.
• Writing for Sociology edited with Jennifer Jones (2007). A writing guide for undergraduates.