Ep.155 – Christiana Ochoa on Deals in the Heartland

Christiana Ochoa, professor of law at Indiana University Bloomington, joins the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her article Deals in the Heartland, which she co-authored with Kacey Cook and Hanna Weil. In this article, Ochoa and her co-authors conduct an ethnography around disputes over wind-farm construction in rural Indiana. Their findings suggest that contracting practices, including formality and transparency, affect the stability of relationships among members of tight-knit communities and the relationships between community members and outside parties. With implications for both contract theory and the race to adopt clean-energy technology, this contractual stability Ochoa and her co-authors identify can, in turn, help wind-farm operators overcome local regulatory barriers. This episode is hosted by Andrew Jennings, assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, with editing by Steven Rozenfeld, a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School.