Research

Abstract: We exploit Stalin's abrupt 1936 nationwide abortion ban to study the dynamic effects of reproductive restrictions. Using newly digitized, year-by-year evidence from declassified Soviet archives, we document a sharp rise in births alongside increases in infant mortality and illegal abortions, consistent with substitution toward unsafe procedures. The national break and long post-period allow us to trace fertility and early-life health trajectories. Linking cohorts forward, children born after the ban exhibit higher crime, with no corresponding change for older, unexposed cohorts. Regions more exposed to the ban experienced no faster industrial growth; adverse early-life conditions and unsafe abortion may have eroded human-capital gains. The results are robust to controls for other Stalin-era interventions, including repression, propaganda, famine exposure, industrialization, and wartime occupation. The evidence suggests that restricting reproductive autonomy raised births but worsened early-life conditions, weakened cohort quality, and failed to deliver the economic gains used to justify the ban.

Abstract: Mass media often  persuades; it can also expand the machinery of repression. We study radio network expansion and political persecution in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the decades leading up to the `Great Terror' of 1937-38. Greater radio coverage systematically intensified political repression: a one-standard-deviation increase in signal strength is associated with about 40 percent more arrests and a 20 percent higher likelihood that an arrested individual is executed, with effects that grew over time. For identification, we exploit newly digitized county-level panel data for 1920–1940 and variation in longwave radio signal strength driven by ground-conductivity differences along propagation paths. Additional repression was disproportionately `misdirected'. Post-Stalin rehabilitation records show that high-signal areas produced substantially more sentences later reversed. Within the security apparatus itself, stronger radio reception reduced recruitment into the NKVD. It also increased the probability that incumbent officers were purged or demoted, consistent with tighter monitoring and escalating internal risk. Mass communication was not only persuasive; it operated as an input into coercive state capacity by lowering the coordination and monitoring costs of repression.

Abstract: Progressive reforms often fail not because they are legally weak, but because they reshape the political opportunity set of actors far outside the reform's intended domain. This paper studies that possibility in the context of Pakistan's Transgender Persons Protection of Rights Act, 2018, a national reform that recognized self-perceived gender identity, expanded access to legal documentation, and prohibited discrimination against transgender persons. The reform targeted legal recognition, not militancy. Yet by making transgender rights newly visible in the administrative and legal order, it created a salient symbol of progressive state action. Using subdistrict-year variation in transgender persons pre-reform, we find that political violence increased after 2018 in high-visibility areas. The effect is concentrated in Balochistan, driven by Baloch separatist organizations, and directed primarily at state-related targets. Mechanism tests point to recruitment and organizational expansion: high-visibility areas experience more active groups, first Baloch attacks in new tehsils, and new group entry. The backlash therefore does not operate only through religious or Islamist actors who directly oppose transgender rights. Instead, progressive reform creates spillovers by allowing non-Islamist militants to frame social inclusion as evidence of an intrusive and out-of-control state, expanding their recruitment capacity and redirecting backlash into anti-state violence. The results show that progressive norms can generate violent complementarities: a reform aimed at inclusion can strengthen recruitment for armed groups whose core ideology is not about gender, but about opposition to the state.