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...

We study the demand for government participation in China's venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both sides of the market: the capital investors and...

How should industrial policies be directed to reduce distortions and foster economic development? We study this question in a multi-sector model with technology adoption, where the production of goods and modern technologies features rich network structures. We provide simple formulas for the...

A relatively mild form of government failure - for example, bureaucrats can count but do not differentiate quality - can significantly affect the efficacy of industrial policy. We investigate this idea in the context of China's largest pro-innovation industrial policy using a structural model....

The effects of immigration are reasonably well understood in developed countries, but they are far more poorly understood in developing ones despite the importance of these countries as immigrant destinations. We address this shortcoming by studying the effects of immigration to Brazil during...

We decode China's industrial policies from 2000 to 2022 by employing large language models (LLMs) to extract and analyze rich information from a comprehensive dataset of 3 million documents issued by central, provincial, and municipal governments. Through careful prompt engineering, multistage...

The European place-based policy framework was established in the European Treaties and has a current budget of $60-70 billion per year. This paper identifies key features and directions for its future development with respect to three place-based problems: traditionally lagging regions;...

Since the 18th century, policymakers have debated the merits of industrial policy (IP). Yet, economists lack basic facts about its use due to measurement challenges. We propose a new approach to IP measurement based on information contained in policy text. We show how off-the-shelf supervised...

We develop a dynamic extension of Dornbusch et al. (1977) with "rustiness": the home country has relatively higher unit costs tomorrow for goods it is not producing today. We solve for optimal tariff policy when there is a potential for a crisis: an increase in demand for goods produced abroad....

Are Chinese industrial policies making the targeted Chinese firms more productive? Alternatively, are efforts to promote productivity undercut by efforts to maintain or expand employment in less productive enterprises? In this paper, we attempt to shed light on these questions through the...