“Missionaries and the Birth of International Development” Draft
The United States is the world’s leading provider of foreign aid. Is this driven by humanitarian motives or strategic interests? Using the travel routes of Student Volunteer Movement recruiters as an instrument, I document that exposure to American Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in boosting congressional support for major foreign aid bills that initiated the modern era of U.S. development assistance. Missionary influence led church denominations to advocate for aid in congressional testimony and encouraged policymakers to frame it in terms of human dignity rather than strategic interests. Beyond advocacy in Congress, missionaries became key experts on non-Western socities, producing social science research and advising the U.S. government. In the long run, missionary influence contributed to a sustained commitment to global development, reflected in increased Peace Corps participation.
“Path Dependence through Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from the Beet Sugar Industry” (Submitted)
December 2024 | Draft | SSRN
This paper investigates the agglomeration spillovers from the beet sugar industry, which was supported by U.S. government as an industrial policy to encourage rural development during the early twentieth century. To estimate the effects of plant openings, I identify runner-up locations for beet sugar plants from a historical trade journal and find that these plant openings had large and long-lasting effects on population and manufacturing activities over one hundred years. The local jobs multiplier was significantly larger in less populated areas, suggesting that low congestion in sparsely settled regions enabled a sizeable impact. The agglomeration spillovers benefited industries not only directly linked through input-output linkages but also extended to broader, less related industries outside the production chain of agricultural processing.
“Estimating the Supply Elasticity of Innovation”
Government R&D may pass through to higher scientists' wages rather than an increase in innovation when the labor supply of scientific workforce is inelastic. This paper leverages granular data on scientists’ productivity, wages, and research funding to estimate the impact of government R&D on both inventive output and wages. To identify these effects, I exploit variation in city size driven by universities’ historical ties to defense funding, which influenced the geographic distribution of scientists through the placement of graduates into research-intensive cities. I find that government R&D increases inventive output, particularly among scientists who do not receive funding themselves. The monetary value of increased inventions outweighs the increase in labor costs. While R&D subsidies do lead to higher wages, the results indicate that government investment in research can enhance overall innovation output through the entry of new scientists and subsequent knowledge spillovers, and that the elasticity of innovation with respect to government funding is large at least in the long run.
“Place-based Costs and Productivity in R&D” (with Sathya Ramesh)
This paper estimates the elasticities of productivity and costs of R&D with respect to urban concentration using data on 0.3 million scientists across American cities. We introduce a novel shift-share instrumental variable based on university-origin and destination-city pairs. Our findings show that the agglomeration elasticity of patents is generally higher than that of wages. However, while place-based costs remain constant across cities of varying sizes, the agglomeration elasticity of patents declines significantly in cities above the median size. These results suggest that place-based policies aimed at fostering economic activity in non-superstar cities could enhance the aggregate productivity of R&D.
“Engineering Human Capital: Long-Run Effects of Wartime Technical Training” (with Mina Kim) Draft
This paper examines the enduring impact of the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT) program (1940-45) on the growth of engineers and scientists. To identify the effect of this training, the analysis leverages residual variation in ESMWT intensity across commuting zones, which stems from prediction errors made by local areas regarding imminent labor shortages during WWII, conditional on other WWII-related factors. The results indicate that this training led to a lasting increase in the number of engineers and STEM workers. Further analyses suggest that it also boosted interest in STEM education and led to increased post-graduate training after WWII. Localized spillovers in defense-related industries, driven by a temporary wartime demand shock, appear to have played a limited role in these changes in the occupational structure.