Research Interest
Research Interest
International Trade, Economic History, Development Economics, Economic geography and Institutions.
Qanats – traditional Persian irrigation systems first built around 1000 B.C. – required a complex of cooperative local institutions for their construction and maintenance. We show that these institutions produced a (local) culture of cooperation in Iran that persists to the present day when qanats are no longer of economic value. We use unique geo-coded data on qanat coordinates in Iran together with information collected and digitized on cooperative enterprises and find a positive relationship between qanat locations and cooperative activities today. We build an IV using grid-level geological preconditions necessary for the construction and functioning of qanats: gently sloped terrains and intermediate clay content. The cooperation culture persists particularly close to historical trade routes and in areas with stable climatic conditions. The results hold for alternative proxies of social capital, namely the degree to which people trust their neighbours and the pervasiveness of charity-based Islamic microfinance establishments.
This project examines the impact of energy-related investments on firms’ energy transition and the factors driving these investments. We develop a theoretical model of firms' energy mix decisions and, based on that, derive an empirical framework to ana-lyze how investments influence energy substitution. Using German firm-level data (2006–2018), we find that energy investments accelerate the shift to cleaner energy sources, reduce fossil fuel reliance, and generate spillover effects across firms and regions, driving industrial decarbonization.
We study the impact of culture on mobilization of the population to engage in protests against mismanagement by the state. Our region of interest is Iran, where the construction and maintenance of traditional small-scale irrigation systems known as qanats have nurtured a culture of community-building and trust. Using geo-referenced data on droughts from the Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and on water-related protests from Armed Conflict Location & Events Data (ACLED) at sub-province and grid-level, we highlight that the presence of qanats serve as a catalyst within communities to coordinate anti-government protests in times of hardship. The interaction of qanats with drought remains strikingly strong and robustly significant after accounting for a battery of fixed effects. We further show that the impact of qanats extends to the mobilization of general protests echoing discontent with the regime. Communities historically endowed with qanats have acquired coordination skills to act as an entity and express their voice against ill-fated policies imposed by the state.