Research

During the 1870s, the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) signed various treaties with the Indigenous communities. Functioning as contracts between the Canadian government and the Indigenous nations, the treaty clauses contain several other stipulations, including provisions for agriculture and livestock. Nations under some treaties negotiated a better "bargain" than the nations under other treaties. At the same time, the DIA created "barriers to entry and exit" by regulating any trade and transactions outside the reserve as well as through the Indian Act. While the former can be considered institutional changes across treaties, the latter signals the overall relative bargaining power. Using multiple sources of digitized historical and spatial data, we try to understand the importance of "institutional differences" across treaties relative to the overall bargaining power of the Indigenous nations, by analyzing the long-term effect on economic development and technology adoption. Our results suggest that treaty clauses which ensure food security enabled more modernized economic structures but the overall weak bargaining power of Indigenous nations meant that no robust and substantial economic gains were realized from better treaty "bargains".

Do high-profile criminal incidents deter future crime or inadvertently increase it by signaling weak enforcement? This paper studies the effects of the highly publicized rape and murder of seven-year-old Zainab Ansari in January 2018 on child sexual abuse patterns in Kasur, Pakistan. Using a district–month panel from 2015–2024 constructed from verified newspaper reports and applying the Synthetic Difference-in-Differences estimator, we compare Kasur’s post-incident trajectory to a synthetic counterfactual drawn from other districts in Punjab. We find a large and persistent increase in reported child abuse in Kasur, equivalent to roughly ten additional cases per month, that does not appear in neighboring or comparable districts. The increase is concentrated in opportunistic offenses involving strangers and acquaintances, single-episode abuse, and locations with weak supervision, while supervised environments show no comparable rise. We further show that judicial congestion is positively associated with reported abuse in Kasur but not elsewhere, suggesting that institutional strain weakened deterrence in the post-incident period—a pattern consistent with inverse deterrence, in which heightened visibility does not translate into effective punishment. While we cannot fully disentangle reporting from incidence, the persistence, localization, severity, and institutional patterns indicate durable behavioral and institutional changes rather than a temporary media-driven reporting spike. The findings highlight a mechanism of inverse deterrence, whereby salient crimes can reshape criminal behavior when public attention rises faster than enforcement capacity.

In this paper, I construct a novel spatial dataset encompassing the entire streetcar network of Chicago for three decadal years (1900, 1910, and 1920). The findings reveal a significant role played by streetcars in city expansion and suburbanization, contributing to population growth away from the central business district (CBD), aligning with the predictions of the monocentric city model. Additionally, I observe a declining population density gradient as the distance from the CBD increases, further confirming the urban model's predictions. Furthermore, by utilizing extinct horsecar lines as instruments, I find that poorer individuals cluster near the CBD where the streetcar network is dense, while those farther from the CBD but near streetcar lines tend to be wealthier. Wealthier neighborhoods are also significantly characterized by lower black and immigrant populations.