Can temporary wartime mobilization change the long-run development trajectory of an economy? We study how mobilization for World War II in colonial India influenced its subsequent development. From 1939 to 1945, the British colonial government purchased massive amounts of war materiel within...

In the marriage market, families make investments on behalf of their young so that they are able to form a household with their preferred partner. We analyze marriage markets in a central region of China between about 1300 and 1850 through the lens of a model of marriage matching and...

Primary historical sources are often by-passed for secondary sources due to high human costs of accessing and extracting primary information-especially in lower-resource settings. We propose a supervised machine-learning approach to the natural language processing of Chinese historical data. An...

Can ideas mobilize people into collective action? We provide a positive answer to this question by studying how exposure to the Communist ideology shaped an individual's choice to join the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the party's formative stage. The individuals we focus on are cadets at...

Opinion is sharply divided about whether the bombing of an enemy's civilian targets and the killing of their combatants results in an adversary's population becoming pacifist or pro-military. Identification is difficult because natural experiments are rare, and effects may be heterogeneous. For...

We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a...

This paper examines the extent to which changes in working-age shares associated with population aging might slow economic growth in upcoming years. We first analyze the economic effects of changing working-age shares in a standard empirical growth model using country panel data from 1950-2015....

What are the long-run effects of permanent changes to the economy? We characterize long-run comparative statics for a broad class of models in terms of expenditure shares, substitution elasticities, and capital supply elasticities. Our key insight is that long-run analysis can be performed using...

This paper draws on cross-country census data to study how agricultural productivity gaps have evolved over the last four decades. We find little tendency for gaps to decline on average despite global decreases in agricultural employment shares. We analyze the dynamics of agricultural...

This paper considers growth and fluctuations in a standard Overlapping Generations (OLG) model with rational expectations, with land (a non-produced asset), credit frictions, and endogenous growth. Under plausible conditions, there can be multiple momentary equilibria, with the multiplicity...