#AcademicRunPlaylist - 12/19/25

I enjoyed putting my family's dreidel skills to shame tonight, and earlier I listened to books for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was "Political Standards" by Karthik Ramanna. This book is an important look at exactly how corporate accounting standards are developed, and the profoundly political nature of what emerges from that process. Ramanna takes a rigorous, analytical approach to this question in the US context, validating hypotheses on the effects of new standards bodies and their membership composition on the contours of emerging accounting guidance, and even follows that up with a survey of the international landscape. While I'm a sucker for analytical detail, some of it might have been better left as a paper citation rather than explicitly spelled out in the book. Overall, given the importance of the metrics companies report to investors and the public on their business, however, Ramanna does a service by delivering a deeper understanding of just how subjective and political this process is is of vital importance. Highly recommend https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo19273046.html

Last was "Suffrage" by Ellen Carol DuBois. There are far too few academic books focused on women's suffrage in the US, and DuBois rectifies this with a methodical chronology of the movement, with a bit of follow up continuing to the present. While there's not much analysis here, the detail is fantastic, and the role of state suffrage movements in pushing through the ultimate success of the movement was instructive. One gets a clear sense of the importance of solidarity given the movement's complex relationship with abolition and later Black voting rights, and the complete failure of mainstream political policies on this issue was instructive. Highly recommend https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Suffrage/Ellen-Carol-DuBois/9781501165184