Description:

Please join the Comparative Historical Social Sciences workshop as they host Katherine Copas and Qin Huang for a double presentation.

Title: "What do people complain about when they complain about banks? Text Analysis of Consumer Complaints Submitted to the CFPB"

Abstract: Consumer complaints are a powerful window into how individuals experience and contest financial institutions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established after the 2008 financial crisis, was founded to protect consumers from unfair practices, in part by mediating disputes between firms and consumers. The recent federal attacks on the CFPB underscore the importance of leveraging this unique data source. This study compares complaints lodged against banks and credit unions using grounded computational theory. Credit unions are cooperative, not-for-profit institutions that present themselves as more customer-focused, raising the expectation that their complaints will differ from those about commercial banks. Structural topic models, qualitative coding, and word embedding regressions reveal that credit union complaints more frequently invoke moralized language, emphasizing how institutional actions created a “burden” or how the treatment is “unfair.” Although bank customers also used this language, they did not do it to the same extent, and most of their complaints focused on the personal issue at hand. Findings from this study emphasize the value in examining credit unions separately from banks and demonstrate the value of using complaint data.

Katherine Copas is a PhD student in Sociology at Northwestern University. Her research interests include Economic Sociology, Historical Sociology, Inequality, Quantitative and Computational Methods.

Title: "Patchwork Capitalism: Institutional Change and Regional Economies in China".

Abstract: My dissertation examines the divergent economic trajectories of China’s regions over four decades of Reform and Opening. Using machine-learning analysis, it identifies four distinct types of regional economies—quasi-liberal, dual-market, state-retreating, and state-dominated—each characterized by varying degrees of market development and state dominance. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in 14 provinces, the study shows that in the 1980s, distinct state–business coalitions emerged, mobilizing region-specific resources and comparative advantages to pursue tailored development strategies. These strategies set in motion four path-dependent trajectories that have since been reinforced. The dissertation argues that China’s economic development rests on a form of patchwork capitalism, in which regions perform distinct economic roles. This regional division of labor has facilitated China’s integration into global capitalism while reinforcing uneven patterns of economic growth across regions.

Qin Huang is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University. His research interests include Comparative Political Economy Chinese Politics Institutional Change Bureaucratic Politics Computational Social Science Comparative and Historical Sociology Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).