Research
Working Papers
Econometrica, Volume 88, Issue 6, November 2020.
The presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and identify its long-run implications for culture and politics. We track the frontier throughout the 1790–1890 period and construct a novel, county-level measure of total frontier experience (TFE). Historically, frontier locations had distinctive demographics and greater individualism. Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive individualism and opposition to redistribution. This pattern cuts across known divides in the U.S., including urban–rural and north–south. We provide evidence on the roots of frontier culture, identifying both selective migration and a causal effect of frontier exposure on individualism. Overall, our findings shed new light on the frontier’s persistent legacy of rugged individualism.
Media Coverage: WSJ, Boston Globe, LA Review of Books, Marginal Revolution, BU Today, Weeds Podcast, Top of Mind Podcast
Rugged Individualism and Collective (In)action during the COVID-19 Pandemic
(with Sam Bazzi and Martin Fiszbein)
Journal of Public Economics, Volume 195, March 2021
Rugged individualism—the combination of individualism and anti-statism—is a prominent feature of American culture with deep roots in the country’s history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the era of westward expansion. While individualism may be conducive to innovation, it can also undermine collective action, with potentially adverse social consequences. We show that America’s frontier culture hampered the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Across U.S. counties, greater TFE is associated with less social distancing and mask use as well as weaker local government effort to control the virus. We argue that frontier culture lies at the root of several more proximate explanations for the weak collective response to public health risks, including a lack of civic duty, partisanship, and distrust in science.
Rural Roads, Agricultural Extension, and Productivity
Journal of Development Economics, January 2023
Low agricultural productivity is a persistent challenge for developing economies. Expansions of rural roads and agricultural extension, separately, have been proposed as solutions with mixed effectiveness. In this paper, I show that it is critical to consider roads and extension together due to their strong complementarities. I study the concurrent but independent expansions of rural roads and extension in Ethiopia, and find that, while ineffective in isolation, access to both a road and extension increases productivity by 6%. The key mechanisms include increased take up of advice, adoption of modern inputs, and advantageous shifts in crop choice and labor allocation.
Media Coverage: VoxDev
Industrial Policy and Misallocation in the Ethiopian Manufacturing Sector
Recent literature highlights that policy induced misallocation of resources across firms within a sector has significant effects on aggregate manufacturing TFP and the overall economic development of a country. In this paper, using a rich plant level census data from 1996-2009, I examine the distortionary effects of two policies designed to support prioritized sub-sectors and regions on the productivity of the Ethiopian manufacturing sector. The first policy, implemented during 1996-2002, was an activist industrial policy favoring import substitution while the second policy, active during 2003-2012, emphasized export promotion. I find that there is a severe misallocation in Ethiopian manufacturing sector, but it has lessened over the studied period. Although improvements in resource allocation across firms of different physical productivity contributed to the observed decline in the dispersion of revenue productivity, there are still large aggregate TFP gains, 92%-180%, from the removal of idiosyncratic distortions. The results suggest that establishment of the priority sector support policies exacerbated the extent of the misallocation, and the sector-based variations (as opposed to location-based) of the policies largely account for the dispersion in revenue productivity. Following the amendment of the first priority sector support policy, the decrease in the within-priority region dispersion of revenue productivity is the driving force for the observed improvements in allocative efficiency.
Work in Progress
"Resettlement, Agricultural Productivity and Rural Development in Ethiopia”
“Performance Based Awards, School Spending and Student Outcomes” (with Yohannes Wogesso)
“Small Mechanization Impact Stimuli in Ethiopia” (with Susan Godlonton and Moti Jaleta)
“Guns, Rails, and Letters: Territorial Expansion and Nation Building in the United States (with Samuel Bazzi, Chelsea Carter, and Martin Fiszbein)