Flooded Cities with Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K.J. McDermott, and Ferdinand Rauch Does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which are among the costliest and most common natural disasters. Over the past thirty years,...

The Responsiveness of Inventing: Evidence from a Patent Fee Reform Do financial incentives induce inventors to innovate more? I exploit a large reduction in the patent fee in the United Kingdom in 1884 to distinguish between its effect on increased efforts to invent, and a decrease in patent quality due...

Frontier Knowledge and the Creation of Ideas: Evidence from the Collapse of International Science in the Wake of World War I We quantify how access to frontier knowledge affects the creation of ideas. We show that citing frontier knowledge is correlated with producing high-quality papers. Because this correlation may be...

The Kindergarten Movement and the US Demographic Transition Abstract: This paper examines how the diffusion of kindergartens during 1880-1910 (commonly referred to as the Kindergarten Movement) contributed to the fertility decline in US cities. Kindergartens were a German education technology that got transplanted to US communities by German immigrants starting...

Immigration, Voting, and Redistribution: Evidence from Post-war Population Transfers   In this paper, we study how immigration affects redistribution at the local level, exploiting a large and sudden population transfer as a natural experiment. In the late 1940s, 8 million forced migrants arrived in West Germany; these were culturally similar...

Autocratic Rule and Social Capital: Evidence from Imperial China This paper studies the consequences of autocratic rule for social capital in the context of imperial China. Between 1660–1788, individuals were persecuted if they were suspected of possessing disloyal attitudes towards the autocratic ruler. Using a difference-in-differences approach, our main finding...

Acts of God? Religiosity and Natural Disasters Across Subnational World Districts Religiosity affects everything from fertility and health to labor force participation and productivity. But why are some societies more religious than others? To answer this question, I rely on the religious coping theory, which states that many individuals draw...