Working Papers
Political Elites and Land Rents: Evidence from Indonesia [updated version] [R&R Journal of Political Economy]
Rural development policy is often implemented by local leaders but it is unclear how to elicit optimal effort. This paper examines the effects of awarding higher political land rents. Using a spatial regression discontinuity, I exploit a historical policy that granted elected village chiefs cultivation rights over village rice land (bengkok) on one side of a historical border, but not the other. Chiefs generate higher local revenue, village public goods (roads), and schooling. Using original surveys, I trace this to positive political selection and, suggestively, higher economic embeded-ness and pro-social motivation. I discuss policy implications. Awarding leaders a stable, within-village revenue stream, can have persistently positive effects on local governance and development
Media: World Bank Development Impact Blog Post, March 2020 Virtual PacDev Presentation (Berkeley)
Conference Presentations: NBER Fall Dev' 22, ASREC Europe '22 (London), ASREC Australasia '22 (Monash), AASLE'22 (UTokyo), SIOE'21, MWIEDC '20, CSAE '20, PacDev '20, NEUDC '20
Less is More in Online Giving: Using Choice Architecture to Improve Donation Outcomes (with Yohanes Eko Riyanto and Masyhur Hilmy) [R&R Management Science]
This paper examines the optimal choice set size in an online donation setting. We randomize the number of beneficiaries (3, 8, or 10) per screen (screen size) in a field experiment. Across screens, the total number and value of donations are highest in the 8-beneficiary treatment (pre-registered). To explore underlying mechanisms, we conduct an exploratory analysis and find that the results are largely driven by differences in refresh rates and beneficiary exposure (choice overload and search behavior). In the 3-beneficiary treatment, donors refresh twice as often but view only half as many beneficiaries compared to the 8- and 10-beneficiary treatments (12 vs 25). Within screens, we classify self-written beneficiary narratives using both manual and machine learning methods to extract key characteristics. Beneficiaries perceived as more deserving receive larger donations (exploratory). Finally, we observe strong evidence of female in-group bias (pre-registered), likely due to the heightened saliency of female poverty among female donors in a male breadwinner context. This study highlights low-cost choice architecture adjustments to maximize donations.
Conference Presentations: NEUDC '21
The Political Economy of Intergroup Contact: Evidence from Malaysia (with Chun Chee Kok, Danial Shariat, Abu Siddique, and Shunsuke Tsuda)
(New draft, March 2025! Submitted!)
Are there particular social structures that allow ethnic diversity to coexist with political stability and economic development? This paper examines the long-run effects of interethnic proximity using quasi-random variation from a colonial-era program that forcibly relocated over 500,000 ethnic minority Chinese into mono-ethnic villages across Malaysia. Ethnic majority Malays residing closer to these villages exhibit lower electoral support for the ethnonationalist coalition, potentially reflecting a moderation of political identity. We observe moderately positive impacts on local economic development. Political effects are stronger in regions with initial, historical interethnic complementarities—even without persistent economic prosperity. Malays report greater contact with Chinese, higher interethnic trust, and weaker zero-sum beliefs. Effects are stronger (reversed) in areas with interethnic complementarities (competition). Throughout, effects on social integration remain muted. These findings suggest that the nature of the underlying economic relationship can have a persistently important role in shaping the long-run effects of contact.
Media: VoxDev, Backstory Podcast (UCSD)
Conference Presentations: RFI Berlin 2026*, 18th Migration & Development Conference '25 (Paris)*, PacDev 2024 (Stanford), Korean EHA '23 (Seoul), APSA '23 (LA), VHPE '21
The Green Revolution and Individualism: Evidence from Indonesia (joint with Yeonha Jung and Uyseok Lee) [R&R Journal of Development Economics]
This paper studies the effects of the Green Revolution—one of the largest development projects in the late 20th-Century—on individualism and collective action. Specifically, we use a difference-in-differences approach to investigate how rapid technological and organizational changes in traditional agriculture reshaped cultural norms in Indonesia—where Green Revolution rollout was largely driven by centralized government interventions. We hypothesize that the disruption of cooperative and interdependent practices—hallmarks of collectivist societies—led to a shift towards greater individualism. Regions with greater exposure to Green Revolution policies experienced significant and persistent increases in individualism (as measured by a higher prevalence of infrequent names) decades after the end of the program. Results are not driven by pre-trends and hold across a battery of robustness checks. We further document a persistent fall in community funding for public goods (collective action). Our findings suggest that technical change can lead to rapid and persistent changes in culture.
Civilian Killings and Long-Run Development: Evidence from the Korean War (joint with Yeonha Jung and Sangyoon Park) [new! under review]
This study examines the economic legacy of civilian killings during the Korean War, which disproportionately targeted local elites, educated individuals, and their families. For identification, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the spatial distribution of killings driven by unanticipated UN military operations. Evidence suggests that local exposure to civilian killings had a persistently negative impact on contemporary development. As a key mechanism, we find that civilian killings led to a relative decline in structural transformation, potentially due to reduced investments in human capital.
Conference Presentations: CESifo Venice Summer Institute,* World Congress (Seoul),* ESoC (Taipei)*
Communities of Commerce: The Legacy of Chinese Immigration on Java (with Sebastian Ellingsen and Quoc-Anh Do) [new! submitted]
This paper studies the economic legacy of ethnic Chinese immigration on Indonesia. Our instrumental variables strategy exploits 15th-century landing sites that shaped subsequent Chinese settlement but lost maritime access due to 17th-century silting. A one-percentage-point higher Chinese share in 1930 leads to 9.4% higher household consumption and 26% higher population today. Using manufacturing census data, we show strong effects on firm sales driven by improved financing through private networks. Effects attenuate sharply during the 1997-1998 crisis, then recover. Despite their small size, ethnic Chinese minorities have played an outsized role in Indonesia’s modern development, with spillovers to the broader population.
Conference Presentations: Tsinghua Growth & Institutions (China),* RIDGE (LatAm),* Hayek Conference (LSE),* SCoPE (USydney),* ADEW (Australia),* SIOE (Sydney),* ASREC (Copenhagen),* Economic History (Uppsala),* Asian Economic History Conference (HKU), Aus Clio Sept 2024*
*co-author presentations
Selected Works In Progress
Inter-Ethnic Proximity and Competition in Southeast Asia (with Chun Chee Kok, Abu Siddique, and Shunsuke Tsuda) [In the field]
Nation building is crucial for economic development. Doing so, however, is particularly challenging for ethnically diverse nation-states (Alesina and Zhuvarskaya 2011). In this project, we focus on one aspect -- the extent to which nation building efforts are shaped by (the lack of) macro-level contact across ethnic groups and the attendant, downstream impacts on inter-ethnic political and economic competition. A crucial problem is that individuals usually have a choice over where they live, and, by extension, whom they interact with. We circumvent this by studying a large-scale colonial resettlement program that created 550 mono-ethnic villages; many of which still exist today. Plausibly exogenous placement of these villages offers us persistent inter-village variation in ethnic proximity and contact. Using this variation, we study long-run effects on inter-ethnic competition and national identity. To do so, we have secured funding to conduct an original, large-scale, in-person, retrospective survey. The final survey will measure, amongst others, inter-ethnic contact rates and attitudes.
Language, Nation-Building, and Economic Development: Evidence from Indonesia (with Arya Gaduh and Chun Chee Kok)
Transportation Networks and Inter-Group Contact (with Thomas Gautier, Harrison Mitchell, and Alex Rothenberg)