Bio

Bio

I am a political economist and doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst, researching the geographically uneven development of global capitalism from a comparative-relational approach in historical perspective. My work bridges classical political economy and contemporary state theory, with special focus on Latin America at the shadow of U.S. Imperialism. I build datasets, formal models, and digital archives—not just to understand history, but to contribute on transformating the present.

Diego Polanco

I am a doctoral candidate in Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, working at the intersection of political economy, economic history, history of economic thought, and macroeconomics.

My dissertation develops this framework through a comparative analysis of Chile and the United States across the Fordist era, combining formal modeling, historiography, and applied econometrics. Drawing on comparative-historical political economy, I study how institutions, technology, and distribution co-determine the long-run dynamics of capitalist development and state formation, incorporating a relational center–periphery dimension to comparative-historical analysis.

I am also exploring the political economy of law, analyzing the hierarchical networks of the repressive apparatuses of the state (RSA) that exercised state terrorism during the Chilean civic–military dictatorship (1973–1990) and the enduring legacies of weak institutional accountability.

Together, these projects aim to explain how capitalist and state dynamics intertwine—how social formations accumulate, institutions adapt, and power reproduces itself across the economic and juridical architectures of modern societies.
Future research will broaden its temporal scope toward the post-Fordist period and its comparative horizon to other Southern Cone countries, tracing the historical and institutional diversity of Latin American development.

Dissertation Research

My dissertation, Essays on Chile and the United States in Comparative–Relational Perspective, develops a demand-led, comparative political economy of capitalist development across the Fordist era. It formalizes how capacity utilization, income distribution, and institutionally conditioned technological change co-evolve to shape accumulation and crisis. Assuming that the elasticity of productive capacities to capital accumulation is not one, the link between accumulation and productive capacity becomes unbalanced, generating distinct accumulation regimes—stagnation tendencies, cyclical crises, and regime breakdowns that require institutional and technological reconfiguration.

The project combines theoretical modeling, historical analysis, and applied econometrics. It builds center-consistent measures of capital productivity and capacity utilization; estimates profitability decompositions for the United States and Chile; and revisits the debate on the rise and fall of the Unidad Popular, the socialist coalition led by Salvador Allende (1970–1973), interpreting this revolutionary period as a critical juncture of world history amid the global transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. The final chapter presents new empirical evidence on how the Keynesian Military Stimulus in the United States conditioned the articulation of external constraint and domestic class conflict.

Overall, the dissertation advances a comparative-relational approach to studying capitalist dynamics, connecting macroeconomic instability to the historical transformation of accumulation regimes at a global scale.

Job Market Paper

Demand and Accumulation in Long-Run Capitalist Development: Unbalanced Growth and Crisis

  • Develops a formal model of capitalist accumulation under persistent technological imbalance, integrating classical and post-Keynesian traditions to show how the feedback of accumulation into capacity creation determines long-run dynamic stability.
  • Identifies crisis as an endogenous regime outcome, demonstrating how persistent unbalanced growth and accumulation–demand dynamics generate distinct domains of instability, distinguishing stagnation, partial crisis, and regime crisis.
  • Link to draft version

New Projects

Alongside my dissertation, I am developing a second research line on Restorative Justice and the Political Economy of Law, focused on how coercive institutions reproduce power through legality. It examines how legal and administrative systems preserve coercive power beyond formal regime change, studying the RSA during the Chilean dictatorship and its institutional persistence in political and civil society. Rather than treating repression as a deviation from legality, this research conceives the legal order itself as a material infrastructure of coercion and hierarchy, through which the state organized terrorism via networks of knowledge, distributing responsibility and authority through hierarchical channels.

Using web scraping of digitized archives and network analysis, I map the civil–military circuits that enabled surveillance, disappearance, and impunity, tracing how these forms of control persisted within democratic institutions. The project approaches the lack of accountability for state crimes as a structural property of power relations, not merely a moral or post-conflict issue. By linking the topology of repression to the architecture of law, it seeks to clarify how a society’s institutional memory can either sustain or dismantle the very conditions that made systematic violence possible.

Ongoing Projects

  • The Ideological Embeddedness of Macroeconomic Indexes — Paper submitted for review
    • Traces how U.S. capacity-utilization metrics shifted from a Keynesian tool to mobilize slack under Fordism to an inflation sentinel in the 1970s, showing that utilization measures were institutionally constructed in the symbiotic interests of Monopoly Capital and the state.
    • Reframes American Keynesianism as government-by-numbers, documenting how survey-based indices crowded out physical measures and arguing for plural, transparent indicators to reopen the policy dashboard to democratic contestation.
    • Link
  • Reconstructing Capital Stocks for Chile, 1901–1994: Dataset & Methods Paper
    • Reconstructs Chile’s gross and net capital stocks in a stock–flow consistent framework, harmonizing Hofman, Clio-Lab, Díaz-Wagner, Tafunell-Ducoing, and Pérez-Eyzaguirre to deliver sectoral series with implicit depreciation and depletion.
    • Establishes a reproducible baseline for profitability and capacity studies, validating accounting identities and documenting sectoral patterns of depreciation and capital scrapping.

A complete list of my publications, working papers, policy pieces, and talks is available on my Research and Talks pages.

Teaching and Mentorship

I have taught or assisted at UMass Amherst, Wesleyan University, Amherst College, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, and Universidad de Chile, covering topics from Macroeconomics and Economic Development to Political Economy of Latin American Development and Social History of Chile.

I have mentored undergraduate and graduate theses on corruption, gender equity, and distributive conflict, with advisees later entering programs at Columbia, Fordham, and USACH.

Research Interests

  • Political Economy of Capitalist Development
  • Macroeconomics of Growth and Distribution
  • Comparative Capitalisms and State Formation
  • Latin American Economic History
  • Applied Time-Series Econometrics and Computational Social Science

Contact

Email: dpolanconeco@umass.com
Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Currently based in Santiago, Chile