Start with the Berkeley PhD Thesis, where Proquest offers a preview. That preview shows interest and research in 1995 Russian credit and banking realities. More insight would need to study the entire thesis, which is not easily obtained online, and for which my own talent and learning is limited.
What is apparent is that a methodology was being explained prior to data analysis, and constraints were highlighted such as the social and historical situation led Cook to note that inquiry of whether private funds were the basis of financing an enterprise, it was not considered proper to ask about how the private funds used in initating a venture were acquired.
It looks like sound scholarship to Crabgrass, and the judgment of Berkeley's economics faculty counts for more than Crabgrass impressions. The thesis committee read the entire work, I did not.
In August of this year NPR featured a review of Cook's scholarship prior to her Fed Board appointment. Endogenous growth theory gains mention at the start of the NPR analysis. Cook saw complications, this dialog from the NPR item:
DUFFIN: So Lisa is pretty sure she's found a blind spot in the hot new economic theory. Maybe innovation also requires safety and equality.
CHILDS: To test her hunch, she needs to find a pool of inventors, where some were subject to violence and inequality, and others weren't. For innovation, there actually is a way to count ideas - patents on inventions. She'll look at data from 1870 to 1940 and compare the number of patents filed by Black and white inventors. If Black inventors file fewer patents during periods of increased violence and lawlessness and they file more patents when violence and lawlessness decrease, then she's proven it.
COOK: The thing that I was deluded about was that all these data were just hanging around and available. Patents were not searchable. There was no Google Patents. You know, race is not recorded on a patent record.
CHILDS: Lisa will have to, patent by patent, figure out a way to identify the race of each filer for the 2 million patents filed in that 70-year period.
COOK: It took me a year to identify the names and then a year to match them to the data and then another year to fail at that (laughter).
DUFFIN: So she plots out the number of patents filed per year chronologically on a graph. She can look back in time and see how Black innovation grew or fell in different times and places throughout this history.
CHILDS: Starting at the beginning of her dataset in 1870, the Civil War was receding in the background. The 14th Amendment had recently passed.
DUFFIN: During this period, African Americans made a lot of gains - holding office, owning property and filing more and more patents. She sees the line on her graph rise.
CHILDS: They invented all kinds of things in this period - an elevator, rotary engines, a tapered golf tee, a dough kneader, a telephone system, a fertilizer distributor.
DUFFIN: But then the story her dataset was telling her took a turn.
COOK: There was a sharp decline in patenting right at 1900, around the time of Plessy v. Ferguson and thereafter.
CHILDS: Plessy v. Ferguson - the Supreme Court ruling that gave official legal sanction to a so-called separate but equal America. Legislators were passing laws that pushed African Americans into not-at-all-equal homes and schools or just cut off access to things altogether. But then she sees another big dip in the patent filings from African Americans and realizes that 1921 was the year of one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history, the Tulsa race massacre.
DUFFIN: This one neighborhood in Tulsa had become famous as a bustling, affluent community. But in late May of 1921, mobs of white men invaded the town. They massacred residents. They also firebombed the neighborhood from airplanes. This haven of Black affluence burned to the ground.
COOK: Tulsa demonstrated that no one would help them - no one. At every single level, nobody had their backs. They were all afraid.
DUFFIN: It was a message that was heard across the country.
COOK: If I'm a Black inventor in another city, why would I ever invent anything if I thought the intellectual property was never going to be defended?
CHILDS: Patent filings by African Americans dropped off across the country.
COOK: The divergence between white patenting and Black patenting was just so stark.
That focus on patenting as a measure of enthusiasm of whether it helped bridge racial cultural bias is shown by reviewing items returned from a search: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C24&q=lisa%20cook%20michigan%20state
For instance, this item was returned as part of the scholar search, a jointly written NBER Working Paper.
"Policies to Broaden Participation in the Innovation Process" was a 2020 Brookings Hamilton Project paper. "Inventing Social Capital" was a theme.
The purpose of writing about Cook is not to catalog the titles of the Scholar rreturned list but to gain a general impression that she used innovation economics, specifically patenting, as a tool to examine racial dimensions, and also gender issues. As a black woman, it made sense to pursue research to objectively learn things her own experiences suggested. Michigan State though enough to admit Cook to its faculty.
Cutting to a separate author's review of Cook's appointment process ideas and worries here; a 16p 2023 analysis with this abstract:
On May 10, 2022, Dr. Lisa Cook was confirmed by a 51-50 vote in the U.S. Senate as the first Black woman to join the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. A coalition of groups supporting her nomination worked to counter attacks from Republican senators with a track record of targeting nominees of color and to contain the impact of right-wing critics on social media. A comprehensive communications strategy built around emphasizing her experience and expertise included tactics to prevent racialized attacks on Dr. Cook from becoming mainstream. Identifying a clear opposing figure, depriving social media trolls of amplification, and turning the phenomenon of white privilege to her advantage all played a role in the public interest communications strategy that aided Dr. Cook’s successful confirmation.
The item begins:
Based on her qualifications alone—both education and experience—Dr. Lisa Cook merited a quick and easy confirmation as a nominee of President Joseph Biden to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. A professor at Michigan State University who, in addition to her academic research, had been a White House staffer and overseer within the Federal Reserve’s system of regional banks already, Dr. Cook could hardly have possessed better credentials for the governing body of the nation’s central bank.
From a public-interest perspective, Cook represented an important step forward for the Fed. Thanks to her own research, she was in the position to advance the Fed’s incipient effort to understand the role of race in the U.S. economy. In time, she might provide a push to policy ideas that would help the Fed to craft policies to address the racial inequities that pervade the U.S. economy.
But as the first Black woman selected to join the Fed board, Dr. Cook had every reason to expect a challenging confirmation process at the hands of Republican senators who, with a track record of throwing sharp, disingenuous jabs at nominees of color (Linskey, 2021), would participate in the Senate debate over her confirmation. Seldom does a person of color, particularly a woman, escape such a process in the current political environment without having to brave this kind of treatment.
The U.S. Senate did eventually approve on May 10, 2022—by the narrowest possible margin of 51-50—the nomination of Dr. Cook. She now sits on the board of the Fed as it grapples with inflation, a possible recession, and stresses in the financial system.
While nothing can take the place of the right nominee, that outcome reflected, in part, a
strategy designed by a coalition of nonpartisan groups who all shared an interest in policies
designed to make the economy, and the financial system in particular, more just and stable. They laid in a strategy to set the right public tone both before and after Dr. Cook’s nomination to the Fed on January 14, 2022. The groups saw the challenge coming, prepared for it, anticipated what the opponents would do, and worked strategically to push positive messages while deflecting or ignoring a disinformation campaign on social media.
What follows is an assessment of the communications strategy and tactics employed to
support Dr. Cook’s confirmation—and ultimately achieve economic and financial policies built around equity and stability. This case study will focus on the communications aspects of Dr. Cook’s nomination that bear on the challenges when the person in question is a Black woman, focusing on nonstandard media and public relations tactics that might be adapted in other public interest efforts.
Adopting a clear strategy and sticking to it proved successful, as did the fortitude to avoid certain standard but resource-intensive tactics and to instead brainstorm new ideas. ountering disinformation with reframing and refusing to dwell on opponents’ falsehoods and lies may have been the most useful tactic. Direct rebuttals of baseless or racist attacks ran the risk of being resource-intensive without necessarily achieving the goal, unless in the service of rebutting a figure who embodied the opposition narrative about Dr. Cook in the Senate. Also, choosing the right validators—in this case, prominent and experienced white men who lent the privilege and prestige they enjoyed—proved useful.
[...]
The upshot, beyond that start, detail of the confirmation approach and 51 to 50 confirmation vote, is given to show that Cook had already faced racial BS before Bill Pulty by reading the entrails of a chicken or some other means formed opinions of a "mortgage fraud" intent and tattled as quick as you can say Jack Robinson, to his beloved mentor and president, so the latter could claim "for cause" to discharge Dr. Cook from her Senate confirmed seat when the Senate process had been a test of lack of any solid cause beyond racial animus to oppose the appointment of Dr. Cook.
It by its nature was a big and hard uphill push in the Senate, and Harris had to cast the deciding vote, but that fight was not to be summarily derailed by Trump saying "for cause" Bill Pulty tells me.
Those are the main part of my thoughts - a competent person, with competence beyond reasonable doubt, with ideas Trump opposes, and a trumped up for cause claim, an assertion by another federal official who's been kind of a head hunter of people he can accuse and tattle on to Trump. Not that such is any part of Bill Pulty's job description, with it, basically, a side talent he appears in multiple instances to exude.
Cook is suing so the courts will do their thing. But for now, it sure as hell looks as if Trump is jumping to a conclusion not because it is firm or solid, but that it is one serving his purposes so that he wants to believe.