“Cultural exchange and the birth of international development”
This paper investigates the impact of intergroup contact on commitment to international development in the context of the Student Volunteer Movement, the largest missionary movement in the United States. Using hand-collected archival records of individual missionaries and volunteers who did not ultimately become missionaries, matched with publication data, this study shows missionary experience deepened social scientific knowledge of non-European countries. To quantify the policy relevance of this knowledge output, I show that U.S. intelligence during World War II relied heavily on missionaries in non-European regions, even more than on other foreign experts, as the U.S. began expanding its international involvement. Building upon these findings, the next part of the paper explores how deeper understanding of foreign countries shaped preferences for foreign aid. Using a shift-share instrumental variable based on denominational exposure to early missionary recruiters in 1886-87, I demonstrate that congressmen representing denominations with greater missionary exposure were more likely to support landmark foreign aid legislation that established the concept of foreign assistance for the first time. This exposure fostered private foreign aid through churches, promoted moral universalism in congressional speeches, and led to an increase in Peace Corps volunteers.
“Path Dependence through Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from the Beet Sugar Industry” (Submitted)
September 2024 | Draft | SSRN
This paper presents evidence of path dependence in economic geography by investigating the agglomeration spillovers from US beet sugar factories, which attracted large-scale manufacturing facilities near farmlands. 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 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.