“Missionaries and the Birth of International Development” Draft
The United States is the world's leading provider of foreign aid. I examine the role of Protestant missionaries abroad in fostering support for international development. I use the travel routes of recruiters from the Student Volunteer Movement, the largest missionary movement in America at the turn of the twentieth century, to generate plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to missionaries across church denominations and regions. I find that a 10-percent increase in missionaries led to a 8-percentage point rise in the probability of congressional votes for foreign aid bills that established modern development assistance during the mid-twentieth century. Exploring mechanisms, I show that exposure to missionaries led church denominations to endorse foreign aid in congressional testimony and encouraged congressional representatives to adopt language showing broader responsibility for people outside their own communities, consistent with evidence that proponents of foreign aid began to defend it on the basis of human dignity instead of strategic interests. Biographical records of 12,265 missionaries and 24,841 runner-up applicants reveal that missionaries emerged as key experts, producing social scientific knowledge on non-European societies and offering critical insights to government agencies during the formative years of global development initiatives. In the long run, exposure to missionaries led to a larger number of Peace Corps volunteers, reflecting a sustained commitment to international development.
“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.
“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.