Paper
David Pinzur studies the relation between the economic puzzles of finance and the material infrastructures of markets. His research compares Gilded Age derivative markets in Chicago and New Orleans to understand why these markets' sociotechnical cores developed along distinct trajectories and with what consequences. The markets' infrastructures are taken as both the stakes and the shifting terrain of conflicts that entwined with material, legal, economic, organizational, and cultural elements of each city. His research additionally links this infrastructural divergence in these cases with macro-level economic effects, including long-term, dissimilarities in price volatility and opposed theoretical perspectives on the nature of derivatives.