Working Paper

When electricity infrastructure adjusts slowly, expansion in one electricity-intensive industry can constrain subsequent local investment in another. We study this interaction between cannabis cultivation and data centers using close recreational cannabis ballots in a difference-in-discontinuities design and a new satellite measure of indoor cultivation. Legalization raises detected cultivation by 3.6 times the sample mean within five years. This increase implies about 22 megawatts of electricity demand from cultivation per county, 18 percent of the average county’s consumption. The active data center stock falls by 0.70 facilities per county and operating capacity by 16.2 megawatts. Retail electricity prices rise where cultivation expands, while total consumption does not move measurably. The decline in data centers begins in the ballot year and also appears in other-state counties on the same grid. We find little evidence of competition through shared labor markets. A discrete-choice model of data center siting implies that absent legalization, more capacity would be built in the narrowly passing states and annual electricity bills there would be 15.6 billion dollars lower.

When does government support succeed in promoting local high-tech industries? We use China's Government Industrial Guidance Fund (GIGF) as a proxy for local-government commitment to high-tech sectors. Exploiting its staggered rollout across industries and prefectures, we find government commitment increases the number of firms by 8.7% within five years. Effects are not explained by selection, spillovers, or GIGF's own investments. Instead, government commitment crowds in private investment through both venture capital and bank credit. Effects scale with committed capital and are stronger when private investors co-invest with the government, pointing to costly commitment and signal transmission as operative channels. Government commitment deepens local co-innovation networks, supply-chain linkages, and high-skill labor markets, generating ecosystem effects that sustain sectoral growth.

Does independent adjudication shape structural transformation? I exploit China's staggered Trans-regional Jurisdiction of Administrative Litigation (TJAL) reform, which reassigns land cases from local to external courts. Using difference-in-differences with micro data, I show that TJAL strengthens rural land rights: compensation per land loss rises 16.3%, with protection concentrated among off-farm households who face such risks. These changes increase off-farm participation (+9%) but constrain urban land supply (built-up area −7.8%), unevenly promoting less land-intensive sectors. A calibrated two-sector model reproduces the observed narrowing of urban-rural income gap and shows that, unlike transfers, judicial independence achieves this while simultaneously improving factor allocation.

How does historical contingency shape long-run economic growth? I exploit China’s 1982–1984 administrative reorganization. Applying political criteria set in Beijing, it replaced much of the Mao-era provincial leadership with Deng Xiaoping’s younger technocrats. Using a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences design, I find that a one-percentage-point increase in replacement intensity raises provincial GDP by 1.8%. The effect appears in the first decade after the reorganization and is still as large four decades later. The growth is not driven by selection on economic potential, and an instrument based on predetermined retirement exposure points the same way.  High-replacement provinces adopted major pro-market reforms sooner and have more economic policy activity even decades later. They also saw faster private-sector expansion and stronger local administration. And the growth was not financed by transfers from Beijing. An early, politically driven personnel shock can start a self-reinforcing reform-growth process and leave provinces on divergent growth paths.

We study whether strengthening legal institutions can reduce civil conflict. We develop a simple conceptual framework linking legal capacity to conflict and test its predictions using the staggered roll-out of donor-funded judicial reforms across African countries in a difference-in-differences design. We find that judicial reforms reduced conflict by about 20%, with effects that grow over time and are concentrated in high-risk subnational regions. These impacts are driven by reforms that expand access to courts, while reforms that primarily improve judicial speed or quality have limited effect. Consistent with the model, reforms reduce civil–civil conflict most strongly where state enforcement is high and and reduce civil–state conflict only where judicial independence is strong. Using GDELT and survey data, we show that reforms increase trust in courts but not in other institutions. Economic growth effects cannot account for the decline in conflict, indicating that improved dispute resolution is the primary mechanism.

In economic history of China, there is a stigma attached to the traditional farming sector which has been commonly seen as the root course of technological backwardness, social inequality, mass poverty, class polarisation, social revolutions, and so forth. This study puts this stereotyped narrative to an acid test with reliable data from China’s first modern survey of the farming sector compiled by John Lossing Buck and his team. It re-examines the bona fide performance of China’s traditional agriculture in its ‘twilight stage’ before 1950. Thereafter, the Chinese Communists started radical programmes of collectivisation and state control over farming. Our results show that China’s traditional farming remained reasonable efficient in terms of agricultural productivity, farm wages and nutrition intake and certain growth potential remained for the sector.