Research
White Papers & Reports
Case-Ruchala, Devin (2025). "The Landscape of US Green Banks." Climate Solutions Lab, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, Brown University.
Green banks have emerged over the past decade as a vital tool for financing climate-related investments in the U.S. These public, quasi-public, or nonprofit investment funds act as financial intermediaries focused on projects that generate environmental benefits. By de-risking clean energy and environmental projects, they help mobilize private capital and reduce costs for end users. Green banks remain understudied--despite their growing prominence--due to limited public awareness, a lack of formal definition, and scarce public investment data. With the launch of a national green bank through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, clearer understanding of green banks is increasingly important for impact and policy evaluation. This paper offers a primer to support future research by defining green banks, examining institutional models across the U.S., and assessing their role in climate finance, while identifying challenges in tracking performance across an evolving national network.
Case-Ruchala, Devin (2024). "Hurry up or wait: Public bank formation in the 20th century." Working paper.
I address a critical gap in financial political economy by examining the formation of public banks, an understudied yet increasingly relevant economic tool. Public banks have a 500-year history, with a surge in formation during the twentieth century and re-popularization after the 2008 financial crisis. Existing research highlights their economic functions but lacks theories explaining their establishment. I identify state formation rather than purely economic interests as a key factor explaining significant variation in twentieth-century public bank formation, especially in relation to decolonization in the Global South. Using the framework of critical junctures, I theorize state formation produces two pathways of public bank formation: serial formation, when economic nationalism and financial disruption coincide with state formation, and irregular formation, which arises through subsequent economic crises coupled with policy advocacy. I support my theory with paired case studies and a recently published dataset and discuss the study’s implications for other temporal and regional contexts.
Peer-Reviewed Publications
Case-Ruchala, Devin (2023). "An old, novel idea: Introducing an original dataset of G-Pub formation." (Supplementary Information). Review of International Political Economy.
Amidst growing financial internationalization, public banks are a reemerging mode of financial governance that can serve as a policy tool for counter-cyclical crisis financing, proactive investment (e.g. green finance), or protectionist lending. Yet no systematic studies examine what leads governments to form public banks in the first place, in part due to a lack of data. This paper introduces an original dataset, conceptual framework, and descriptive empirical insights to serve as the basis for future research. I discuss contending definitions of public banks to advance the more targeted conceptualization of ‘government-initiated public banks’ (G-Pubs), or banks that are formed by governments and remain under government control through ownership and/or management. The dataset includes 1,355 banks and spans 195 countries for the period 1401–2020. Using these data, I test prevailing assumptions suggesting G-Pubs are more likely to form in less developed or more autocratic countries. I show that for the period 1970–2020, G-Pub formation is instead associated with developed democracies. Descriptive analysis prior to the 1970s further supports a more complex view. These findings underscore the need for a renewed research agenda on public banking that considers both domestic and international political economic dynamics, including international diffusion, financial integration, and crisis mechanisms.
Case-Ruchala, Devin (2023). "A Paradox of Openness: Democracies, Financial Integration & Crisis." Review of International Organizations.
Why do democracies experience financial crises more often than non-democracies? Revisiting the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) as a significant and informative test case, I argue that considering the way domestic institutions inhere in system-level structures is important to explaining crisis susceptibility among democracies since the turn of the twenty-first century. I introduce the mechanism of co-regime financial connections in showing that regime type is an important systematic feature of global financial flows. Employing a latent space network regression model using IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS), I find that the network of cross-border portfolio asset investments is systematically patterned by co-democracy pairs. I then show that this regime-patterned interdependence affects increased financial crisis susceptibility among democracies. My findings build on literature highlighting the interdependence between domestic- and system-level factors and inform an empirical puzzle regarding the prevalence of financial crises among democracies.
Case-Ruchala, Devin and Nance, Mark (2024). "The Limits of Enforcement in Global Financial Governance: Blacklisting in FATF as Rational Myth." (Supplementary Information). International Studies Quarterly.
How might international institutions matter? To consider this central question of International Relations, we analyze a most-likely case for the importance of materially driven enforcement: the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) use of blacklisting in the global regime targeting money laundering and terrorism financing. Scholars and practitioners often argue that fear of financial harm caused by FATF’s lists explains the near-global commitment to FATF’s standards, even if compliance lags. We search for statistical evidence of this impact across four different measures of financial flows and find that listing is not correlated with financial harm. To explain these null results, we examine bank decision-making and find that the lists’ impact is likely diminished by two overlooked factors: the existence of multiple, competing lists and banks’ access to more fine-grained, client-specific information provided by third-party companies. We interpret this contradiction—a commitment to compliance generated in part by a fear of enforcement, despite a lack of evidence for enforcement’s impact—as a “rational myth.” The results challenge a common understanding of a major global governance regime, confirm ideas about the limited ability of states or International Organizations to control governance outcomes, and advance a new research agenda on the impact of bank decision-making on global governance.
Case-Ruchala, Devin and Melina Tobías (2025). “The Hard Work of Progressive Public Lending: FONPLATA and Financing the Sustainable Development Goals in Buenos Aires.” Chapter 2 of edited volume "Public Banks and Public Water in the Global South." Routledge.
This paper explores the innovative financing model between the regional public development bank FONPLATA and the Argentinian water operator Agua y Saneamientos Argentinos S.A. (AySA) aimed at supporting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. In 2019, FONPLATA approved a loan to finance the Water + Work and Sewage + Work (W/S+W) programs, which enhance water and sanitation services while creating local employment by hiring cooperative members. This results-based loan ties disbursements to specific targets such as water and sewage connections, job creation, and gender equity. The study highlights the collaborative efforts between FONPLATA and AySA, illustrating how public-public partnerships can effectively address socio-economic goals. The paper also examines the challenges and successes of implementing this financing model, which has set a precedent for similar and subsequent loans for this kind of programs, historically financed by National Treasury. By detailing the development and impact of the FONPLATA-AySA partnership, the study contributes to the discourse on financing sustainable public services and the role of public development banks in achieving the SDGs.