I. Droughts, Conflict, and Importance of Democratic Legitimacy: Evidence from Pre-Industrial Europe (Job Market Paper; Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Economic History)

This research examines the relationship between droughts, city-level conflict, and local governance in Europe from 900 to 1800 A.D. I use a unique dataset on local drought intensity, combined with information on city-level conflict, to show that droughts are robustly associated with the outbreak of violent unrest over this time period. This relationship is non-linear, with disproportionately greater increases in the probability of a civil disturbance among droughts in the upper tail of the severity distribution. I obtain evidence that such conflict may be due to higher food prices, as droughts are associated with significant increases in the price of wheat. Cities with participative political institutions, in the form of a commune, are less likely to experience such conflict, but the characteristics of this governance are important as well. City governments based on democratic elections are relatively immune from such drought-induced conflict, while those based on representation by burghers or guilds are not. These results suggest that local governments are key for maintaining social stability during economic shocks, and are most successful when they have a greater degree of democratic legitimacy.

II. Lexical Distance and the Diffusion of Technology (Under Review)

This research shows that linguistic differences can obstruct the diffusion of technology and contribute to disparities in living standards between countries. I use a new measure of lexical similarity known as the normalized Levenshtein distance to show that language differences closely track bilateral differences in the adoption intensities of various economically important technologies. This relationship manifests across technologies in the transportation, information technology, steel, telecommunications, and health sectors. I estimate these relationships using member nations of the OECD, a group of countries with broadly similar institutional characteristics that account for over half of global GDP and trade. I then show that this variation in the intensity of technology adoption has important ramifications for aggregate living standards, as greater linguistic distances are also associated with greater bilateral differences in GDP per capita among OECD members. A plausible channel for these effects is via trade, as economic exchange is significantly reduced between pairs of countries with a higher lexical distance.

III. Holocene Climate Change and the Origins of Economic Development

This research examines the impact of Holocene climate change on human development in Europe over the past 12,000 years. I use spatial and temporal variation in early Holocene warming, along with Carbon-14 dated archeological data, to show that higher temperatures from 12,000 to 4,000 years before present were a key determinant of regional neolithic transitions. I show that these transitions were primarily due to the settlement of warmer regions by Early European Farmers, an ethnic group from the Middle East; in contrast, the native European hunter-gatherers did not adopt agriculture on a significant scale. Warmer regions subsequently witnessed significant increases in population density. This diffusion of agriculture created a path-dependency in the spatial distribution of human activity, as areas that witnessed consistently warmer temperatures over the early Holocene now contain a higher population density and greater economic activity.

IV. Legacies of Inequality: The Case of Brazil (Published in the Journal of Economic Growth (2020))

This research examines the effects of inequality on long-run development within Brazil. I first exploit variation in temperature and precipitation to instrument for the local distribution of land in 1920 using a two stage least squares instrumental variables framework. My instrument is an index quantifying the suitability of local climatic conditions for plantation versus smallholder agriculture. I construct this index using information on the growing conditions of crops within certain plant taxonomies that are more biologically suited for smallholder or plantation production. I argue that this index more fully identifies the optimal environmental conditions for these two types of agricultural production, and I show that it serves as a robust predictor of local land inequality in the year 1920. IV estimates then reveal that greater inequality is associated with less local government spending on welfare and public goods over the 1995-2005 time period, as well as reductions in measures of local government quality and per-child education spending. It is also associated with lower levels of development, as measured by the local Human Development Index (HDI) for the year 2000. Inequality primarily affects the HDI through shorter life expectancies and lower incomes. I argue that the latter is consistent with the agrarian elite obstructing the transition of the local economy from agriculture to industry/services, as historically unequal municipalities contain a greater percentage of workers in the lower-wage agriculture sector, and this sector itself constitutes a larger share of local GDP.

V. The Unintended Harms of Infrastructure: Opium and Road Construction in Afghanistan (Published in The Journal of Comparative Economics (2021))

In this paper, recently published in Economics Letters (August 2017), my co-authors and I show that an oft-observed relationship between a child’s season of birth and their subsequent growth is due to a spurious relationship between birth month, age at measurement, and child growth patterns. We first replicate the findings of Lokshin and Radyakin (2012), who present evidence that birth month is a significant predictor of children’s growth patterns in India (as measured by a child’s height-for-age Z score). We then demonstrate that this relationship is spurious, and repeat the analysis on 39 additional countries to show that there is no evidence of seasonal birth effects on children’s growth trajectories in any developing country. Furthermore, our paper shows that the Demographic and Health Survey data used to estimate this correlation is not suitable for this task, due to a previously unrecognized source of measurement error in a child’s month of birth. We document results from several recent studies that should be re-interpreted in light of our findings.