Research Statement
Suresh Naidu
My research has focused on the empirical political economy of development, a field that has
experienced rapid growth in the last 15 years and intersects with political economy, economic
history, and development economics. Most of my work is organized around two broad topics:
coercion and monopsony in labor markets, and political transitions and conflict. These two topics
overlap in many of the historical contexts I study: costly labor market mobility restrictions,
enforced by legal coercion, require anti-democratic institutions to sustain them.
I have brought a diverse set of tools to these topics. Many of my projects have involved archival
research and massive digitization efforts. Others have used already-collected observational and
administrative data, exploiting quasi-experimental variation in reduced-form analysis. Currently,
I am implementing a large-scale randomized field experiment in India to test for double
marginalization in migrant recruitment as well as experimentally estimating monopsony in online
labor markets. More recently, I have been using tools from computational linguistics to reduce
high-dimensional text-based representations of labor laws, contracts, and political language into
lower-dimensional quantitative measures.
The Political Economy of Unfree Labor Markets
Democratic institutions and labor market structure are tightly intertwined, as the kinds of labor
contracts that can be enforced need to be compatible with inclusive politics and civil liberties. The
labor markets I have studied have involved the use of force to regulate the supply of labor to the
firm. These empirical contexts are where political economy concerns about the role of the state
and the rules of violence intersect with traditional labor economics topics such as wage setting and
the distribution of income. I have been writing papers that use extensive original data on American
slavery, indentures across the British Empire, contemporary guest worker programs, unions both
past and present, and even online labor markets.
The themes of quasi-free labor and non-democratic political institutions come together in my 2013
American Economic Review paper, “Coercive Contract Enforcement: Law and the Labor Market
in 19th Century Britain”, with Noam Yuchtman. In England until 1875, workers could be criminally
prosecuted, which often entailed quite severe Victorian punishments, for leaving an employer
without permission, called “breach of contract”. Criminalized contract breach is a legacy of feudal
Master and Servant law, which governed employment relationships in England since the 1351
Statute of Labourers (and was an important reference point in Coase’s “Theory of the Firm”).
These laws were exported around the empire, and saw use in India and Africa as well as Australia,
Canada, and the United States, and continue to shape legal precedents in employment law. In
England, we find that prosecutions of contract breach varied with labor demand shocks to the coal,
textile, and iron sectors, with positive shocks to output prices in those sectors increasing
prosecutions in counties that specialized in those products. Then we show that following the 1875
repeal of Master and Servant, wages increased more in the counties that had higher levels of
prosecutions. Finally, we show that responsiveness of wages to productivity shocks also increased
following repeal, as workers could no longer commit to staying with employers during boom
times, so long-term wage contracts unraveled.
A few interesting things about studying these laws: First, the repeal was a direct consequence of
the expansion of the franchise to all adult men in 1867 and the rise of the trade union movement
in the 1870s. In theory, Master and Servant law could have been contracted around, and political
repeal should have been unnecessary. However, employers could not commit to not use the law to
break strikes, and so repeal became a political priority for the trade union movement and the labor
party. Second, our paper shows that these feudal laws were actively used in the most advanced
sectors in the most advanced economy of the 19th century; while most studies of coerced labor
have focused on agriculture, our paper suggests that there is no essential contradiction between
industrialization and the use of legal restrictions on labor. Third, while La Porta et al (2009) have
pointed out how British common law is superior at enforcing contracts, our paper shows that this
strict enforcement of contracts in the labor market is at odds with standard ideas of “employment
at will”.
Legal restrictions on job mobility are also pervasive in guest worker programs all over the world,
and guest workers are almost always excluded from the political life of their host countries.
Nowhere is this more salient than the United Arab Emirates, where 96% of the private workforce
are migrant guest workers, working under the Kafala system (itself a legacy of British colonial
labor law), which binds them to particular employers. Many commentators (such as Milanovic
2016 and Clemens 2013) have called for radical expansion of such guest-worker programs as
enormously effective anti-poverty devices. Some even argue that the Gulf countries do more to
reduce world inequality per capita than all the foreign aid and within-country redistribution
conducted by the OECD (Weyl 2016).
In the UAE, guest workers, generally from South Asia, are on fixed 3-year contracts, which are
tied to employer-specific visas (just as in the US). Pre-2011, even when the contracts expire,
workers had to either renew with the employer that brought them or return to their home country
for at least 6 months. This requirement was repealed in 2011, and workers could switch to new
employers in the UAE upon contract expiration. But workers still had to fulfill their old contract
to the full 3-year extent. We then look at workers whose contracts expired right before the reform,
versus those whose contracts expired right after. This creates variation in the degree of monopsony
(wage-setting power) employers have. In monopsonistic labor markets, employers set wages below
marginal product, trading off lower labor supply at the margin in exchange for lower wages paid
to the inframarginal workers. Competition makes the labor supply facing the firm more elastic,
and weakens this wage-setting power, and thus wages increase, and labor supply to the firm
increases.
Consistent with the reform reducing monopsony power, we find that wages go up, even as the
number of workers that choose to stay with their employers also goes up. This paper is not only
one of the first uses of administrative data from a Gulf country (we have matched worker-firm data
for the virtual universe of migrants), but also one of the few papers to directly test monopsony by
exploiting a change in the degree of competition for a given pool of labor. We can use these
estimates to figure out how much migrant workers are paid below marginal product, which is about
50%. Policy makers thought they would discourage the overuse of migrant workers by raising
costs, but because of the market structure, the pro-competition reform in fact increased the
retention of incumbent migrant workers.
This paper, “Monopsony in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates”
was published as lead article in the Journal of Political Economy, has received extensive media
coverage (e.g. covered in the New Yorker and twice in The Economist) and has resulted in a number
of follow-up projects studying migration from South Asia to the Gulf as well as extensive
discussions with policy makers interested in migration and guest worker programs.
One secondary result from this paper was that employers reduce demand for new recruits from the
source country, as a model with incumbent migrants and new recruits would suggest. But a more
surprising result is that firm-specific wages for new workers fell more for firms experiencing a
large number of incumbent worker contract expirations (relative to prior to the reform), suggesting
market power even in the market for new recruits. We were puzzled by this, and realized that the
market structure for recruitment of new migrants was also characterized by extensive
imperfections. In particular, and of policy relevance in both India and the UAE, there is a large
quasi-legal market in labor brokers, who charge steep fees (50% of annual UAE earnings) to
potential migrants.
Our next project in this domain involves a large scale RCT to learn about this market. We have
obtained close to $500,000 from the REALM research program, to run experiments at the
recruitment centers in India where migrant workers are screened prior to receiving an offer. We
have already randomized 3000 job offers and plan on also randomizing wage bonuses to potential
UAE migrants. Along with comprehensive well-being (including psychological and physical
health) and economic outcomes, we are measuring the fees these migrants pay to the Indian labor
brokers that facilitate migration. The effect of a wage bonus on the broker fee reveals the split of
the surplus of migration between agents and workers. We are also eliciting preferences over
political and labor rights to see if migrants do in fact value the citizenship rights they are trading
off in going to the UAE. Given the rising importance of immigration as a development as well as
a political issue, I expect to continue work in this area for some time.
In the same theme, it is well known that the Jim Crow South imposed many restrictions on black
labor market mobility. One state-level law in particular, anti-enticement (inherited from British
Master and Servant law), made it a crime for an employer to make an offer to a sharecropper under
contract with another employer. In “Recruitment Restrictions and Labor Market Outcomes in the
Post-Bellum South” I estimate the effects of these laws on agricultural wages, sharecropper
mobility, and the returns to experience in the Jim Crow South. The paper presents a new dynamic
model of job-search and labor market transitions tailored to the agricultural tenancy ladder of the
rural South. The model predicts both lower agricultural wages as well as lower transitions from
sharecropping into independent tenancy following passage of the anti-enticement law. I test both
of these predictions using a state-year panel in agricultural wages as well as a retrospective panel
of black tenants from Jefferson county, Arkansas. A particularly interesting prediction of that
model was that the returns to experience would be lower for black workers who lived longer under
these anti-enticement laws, as the arrival rate of better offers would be lower. I find confirmation
of that prediction in 1940 micro census data. This paper bridges the economic history literature
on the Jim Crow period, which had taken a competitive view on the Jim Crow labor market, with
the traditional historian’s emphasis on legal restrictions on black labor mobility. This paper is
published in 2010 in the Journal of Labor Economics, part of a special issue on monopsony in the
labor market. This paper has been cited in several reviews of the literature on monopsony in the
labor market, such as the Handbook of Labor Economics chapter by Alan Manning (2011) as well
as the recent brief on monopsony put out by the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA 2016).
The research interest in Southern labor markets for black workers also continued into “When the
Levees Broke: Black Migration and Economic Development in the U.S. South” with Richard
Hornbeck, published in the American Economic Review in 2014. We estimated the effect the 1927
Mississippi Flood had on the Jim Crow regime in the U.S. South. This paper uses an environmental
shock to generate variation in factor endowments that leads to structural transformation of an
underdeveloped economy. The Mississippi Delta was a microcosm of the labor repressive
agricultural economy of the U.S. plantation South when the flood hit. We found that the flooded
counties experienced a large, permanent black outmigration, and induced large-scale
mechanization and modernization of agriculture, largely due to capital-labor substitution and
tractor adoption. Flooded counties retain a lead in tractor adoption and agricultural capital well
into the 1960s. The fact that differences in fraction black population persisted between flooded
and non-flooded counties is indirect evidence that labor markets were not perfectly competitive.
Surprisingly, and consistent with the underlying political economy of the South, land values per
acre fall in some specifications, despite no change in total population, and large increases in
acreage, output per worker and capital per worker. The land values are indirect evidence that
landowners did not benefit from the modernization of agriculture, suggesting that the previous
labor-repressive and labor-intensive equilibrium was indeed profitable for plantation owners. The
bigger point of the paper is that it took a large, costly shock to induce a transition to a capitalintensive agricultural sector. In contrast to much of the persistence literature, we show that
historical institutional legacies (like American Jim Crow) can be undone by big shocks, and thus
history is not necessarily destiny. This paper was reprinted in The International Library of Critical
Writings in Economics, and summarized in a recent VOX e-book on historical legacies in economic
development.
Prior to the Jim Crow economy, there was of course slavery, which my research suggests was
qualitatively different from monopsony. With Felipe Gonzalez and Guillermo Marshall, I
published “Start-up Nation: Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland” in the
Journal of Economic History exploring the financial dimension of slavery, which has not been
studied systematically by economic historians. Drawing on new data on entrepreneurship in Civil
War Maryland, we look at business formation rates of slave-owners (in 1860) before and after the
1864 constitutional amendment referendum, which abolished slavery, as Maryland was exempt
from the Emancipation Proclamation. We find that slave-owners started small businesses at a
higher rate than non-slave-owners, and this effect disappears in 1864. We argue that this is because,
as mobile, thickly traded assets, slaves were a more liquid source of collateral for start-up funding,
not because slave-owners had any advantage in production. Further interests in American slavery
include works-in-progress on fugitive slaves, the productivity of slave plantations (both with
Jeremiah Dittmar), and the allocation of slaves in spatial equilibrium (with Treb Allen). The
project on fugitive slaves uses new data on runaway slave ads to reconcile the low census count of
fugitives (1000 out of a slave population of 3 million) with the political attention given to the issue
in the 1850s. We show the census is an undercount, by a factor of 10. In addition, by counting all
instances of an ad, we are able to bound the duration of a runaway spell, and show that while very
few runaway slaves successfully escape, there is a regular “turnover” of flight and recapture,
implying close to 80,000 escapes a year, generally ending within a few months. The project with
Allen deploys recently developed spatial equilibrium in trade models to calculate the spatial
distribution of 19th century populations with and without slavery, leveraging the idea that while
free workers respond to both real wages and amenities, slaves were allocated only according to
marginal product. All of these projects have in common the emphasis on slavery as a system of
property rights that facilitates an ex-ante elastic (rather than inelastic, as in monopsony) labor
supply to farms, as emphasized by Fleisig (1976) and Wright (2006) rather than the emphasis on
slavery as a production function (Fogel and Engerman 1974).
Labor coercion need not be applied only to individuals. Another historically important labor
market institution is labor unions, who have a distinctly conflictual and violent history, particularly
in the United States. A 2016 chapter for the Oxford Handbook of American Economic History with
Noam Yuchtman discusses the political economy of late 19th century labor conflict in the United
States. We survey and collate the diverse datasets that exist on wages, strikes, union membership
in the Northern U.S. states, and show that there was a substantial firm-level rent-sharing elasticity,
roughly .15 (very close to the magnitudes in contemporary datasets, e.g. as in Card et al. 2016)
consistent with significant monopsony. We argue that much of the violent labor conflict of the
period and political responses to that conflict (e.g. the expansion of police and militia) can be
understood as fights over those firm-specific rents.
One very curious thing, given the general richness of the U.S. labor statistics, is the lack of any
micro-data on union membership prior to the CPS. Indeed, previous vintages of labor economists
bemoaned the lack of individual-level data on union membership as late as 1965. The data on midcentury unions that is widely used is derived from surveys of unions, not individuals, and unions
had incentives to overstate membership, as this was used to allocate seats at labor conventions.
We are attempting to rectify the lack of union data. With Ilyana Kuziemko, I have begun a number
of projects that harmonize a new source of historical economic data: political polls conducted by
the Gallup organization, which go back to 1937. While Gallup is well-known as a source of public
opinion data on political issues, the rich economic data they contain has not been exploited. Indeed,
the public opinion questions change from survey to survey, but many of the economic questions
stay constant. With Henry Farber and Dan Herbst, we use this novel source of data to a) calculate
a new measure of both annual and state-year union density back to 1937 b) estimate the union
premium and selection into unions during peak union power, and c) estimate the state-year
relationship between inequality (measured by share of income going to the top ten percent) and
union density with state and year fixed effects, something that was not possible prior to this data.
We are presenting this work at the NBER Development of the American Economy Meetings in
March 2017.
I have also worked on topics close to monopsony in contemporary U.S. labor markets, beginning
with a paper published during graduate school on minimum wages and employment in the
restaurant sector (with Arin Dube and Michael Reich). The paper compares restaurant employment
in San Francisco and Oakland following an increase in the San Francisco minimum wage, using a
unique survey. While the paper finds no employment effect from the minimum wage increase
(consistent with much of the literature), one novel result from this paper that stayed with me was
the fall in turnover experienced by affected firms. While hires fall in affected firms, separations
fall also, consistent with dynamic models of monopsony. This paper, entitled ““The Economic
Impacts of a Citywide Minimum Wage” was published in the Industrial and Labor Relations
Review. A work in progress with Arin Dube and Alan Manning experimentally documents
pervasive monopsony in even online labor markets, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, and
rationalizes the ubiquitous bunching at round numbers in the wage distribution (both online and
offline) as a combination of employer misoptimization and monopsony power.
Democracy, Political Conflict, and Development
My work on the relationship between non-democracy and economic development began with
“Coups, Corporations and Classified Information”, with Ethan Kaplan and Arin Dube. This was
an empirical analysis of CIA-sponsored coups in developing countries during the Cold War. We
looked at the stock prices of companies that had been nationalized by a government that was
subsequently overthrown by the CIA. The CIA has declassified many of the internal records
concerning its operations during the Cold War. We constructed daily timelines of these records
and conducted an event-study, looking at events that should have been classified information. We
find that, indeed, information did leak from the CIA to the stock market, as evidenced by abnormal
returns in the daily stock price of companies that had been nationalized by the government about
to be overthrown. This paper received a fair amount of press attention, was covered in Slate
magazine, as well as favorably cited in Zitzewitz’s survey of “forensic economics”, which uses
data to uncover potentially illegal relationships. It was published in the Quarterly Journal of
Economics in 2011 and was an “Editor’s Choice” paper. Our paper was one of the earlier papers
to use declassified CIA documents as data sources, and subsequent papers have exploited this data
source to measure political transitions as well as theoretical papers looking at superpower backed
political transitions. A key insight of this paper for future work was that asset market prices could
be a useful tool for evaluating not just policies, but also the incidence of large-scale political
transitions.
The idea of using asset prices to evaluate the incidence of political transitions recurs in other
papers of mine. For example, in “Suffrage, Schooling, and Sorting” I looked at the political
conditions underlying the anti-enticement laws and the broader Jim Crow economy. I looked at
the effects of disenfranchisement of black Americans in the late 19th century. In that paper, I
used cross-state border counties to construct control groups in order to estimate the effect of poll
taxes and literacy tests on elections, public goods, and factor market outcomes. I find that voting
restrictions, predictably, lowered turnout, increased the Democrat vote share, and lowered black
schooling inputs. I also find that land values went up, while the fraction black fell. This is
consistent with a model where black turnout falls and the political equilibrium implements
policies that reduce black schooling expenditures, lower taxes on land and institute labor market
regulations (such as the anti-enticement laws) that lower black wages. Again, I use the idea that
the asset price, in this case land, reflects the incidence of a large political change, and the paper
develops a model that generates “sufficient statistic” formulas that translate the land price gains
into increases in the welfare of landowners. Similarly, the migration response of black workers
yields, via the model, an estimate of black welfare losses. While I have put this project on hold
while I pursue other avenues of research and collect additional data on labor market outcomes, I
plan on returning to it eventually.
The next published paper in this line of research is a survey article, “Democracy, Redistribution,
and Inequality”, on the effects of democracy on economic inequality for the Handbook of Income
Distribution, with Daron Acemoglu, Pascual Restrepo, and James Robinson. This paper went
through the theoretical mechanisms and empirical evidence relating democratization to economic
inequality and redistribution, beginning with the median voter model but progressively altering the
policy instruments available. We found that democracy, while increasing tax revenue and public
good provision, had no discernable average effect on inequality. However, it did exhibit
considerable heterogeneity, consistent with a variety of theoretical mechanisms. Most interesting
is that we found evidence of “Director’s Law”, where democracies redistribute from the ends of
the distribution to the middle. We found that when the poor have a high share of income under
non-democracy, democratization increases inequality, as the middle class transfers income to
themselves, just as when the rich have a high share of income under non-democracy,
democratization decreases inequality.
However, in the course of writing the Handbook chapter (and aggregating existing measures of
democracy to form a unified measure), we noticed that transitions to democracy were preceded by
negative shocks to GDP growth (partially owing to political conflict) in the standard country-year
panel. While this “Ashenfelter dip” has been noticed before, its importance in confounding the
effect of democracy on growth had not been taken advantage of. This prompted us, in “Democracy
Does Cause Growth”, to take a dynamic panel approach in a very large and crowded literature, by
very simply adding lags of GDP to the standard regression (which regresses GDP on a democracy
measure including year and country fixed effects). We extend dynamic propensity-score
estimators to construct non-parametric impulse response functions, which ensures that the lags
only enter the propensity to democratize, independently of the subsequent dynamics of GDP. We
also use an instrument derived from regional waves of democratization (e.g. Southern European
autocracies in the 1970s). We find that democratization has a robust positive long run effect on
GDP (and GDP growth) when lags of GDP are included, and this effect is extremely robust. We
show that diverging results in this extensive literature are either driven by less precise
measurement of democracy or a failure to control for dynamics of GDP. This paper is forthcoming
at the Journal of Political Economy, and was featured in the Economist magazine in July 2015.
Other work in the theme of conflict and economic development includes a paper, “Bases, Bullets,
and Ballots” published in the 2013 Journal of Politics on U.S. military aid and paramilitary
violence in Colombia, joint with Oeindrila Dube. This paper uses time-series variation in military
aid to Colombia together with spatial variation in Colombian military bases to show that U.S.
military aid has been diverted to illegal paramilitary activities. My first publication in this theme
was a study of land occupations in Brazil. Land invasions are common in rural Brazil, organized
by large movements of the rural poor. With a trio of political science graduate student coauthors,
the paper used rainfall variation as a lens to examine the effect of income shocks in a rich dataset
of land invasions in Brazil. Examining heterogeneity, we find that the effect of a negative income
shock was largest in places with high land inequality, and also places with a high fraction of fixedrent tenancies, relative to wage labor. Since fixed rent tenants bear the full effect of productivity
shocks, while wage workers are insured by their employers, this pattern of heterogeneity makes
economic sense. This paper, “Economic Determinants of Land Invasions” was published in the
Review of Economics and Statistics in 2010, was one of the earlier within-country papers to look
at the effect of environmental and income shocks on conflict, a literature which has seen a number
of recent contributions. It was also one of the first papers to use the non-monotonic relationship
between rainfall and income.
Political Conflict, Law, and Language
While many of the papers above study overt, often violent, political conflict, in many contexts
political conflicts occur in the domain of ideas and ideologies, where people argue over the
meaning of words and the content of legal language. In writing “Coups, Corporations and
Classified Information”, I wound up going back to a lot of the programming skills I had developed
as an aborted computer science major and ex-software developer to sift through large collections
of declassified pdf files. Once I began at Columbia, I began investigating methods developed in
computer science for handling large collections of text, and automatically categorizing and even
understanding them. As more historical documents became digitized, the prospects of teaching
computers to make sense of them increased. Substantively, the study of language allows
quantitative researchers to understand the independent role of ideas and ideology in political and
economic life, which are normally dismissed as “cheap talk” or simply a veil on “true” economic
interests. But formal institutions (like laws and contracts) and political disagreements are encoded
in collections of words and phrases whose adoption and interpretation is contested.
“Political Polarization and the Dynamics of Political Language”, published as lead article in the
February 2013 issue of Brookings Papers on Economic Affairs, breaks some new methodological
ground in analyzing political ideology and partisan conflict in US history. We took 140 years of
the Congressional Record, back to Reconstruction, and then parsed the text into speaker-phrase
form. We then calculated correlations of phrase use with party of speaker, and thus statistically
identified the most “partisan” phrases in the Congressional record in any given year. We then used
counts of these phrases in Google Books (a corpus of 5.2 million digitized books) to construct a
measure of “partisanship” in political discourse at large, rather than just in the legislature. Using
time-series regressions, we found that partisanship of political discourse in books was strongly
associated with periods of domestic political violence, as the late 19th century was characterized
by widespread lynching and strikes as well as very heated political rhetoric. We then also find that
partisanship of political discourse explains legislative gridlock better than Congressional
polarization measured either by votes or by rhetoric (although linguistic polarization is sensitive
to the precise pre-processing filters used). Then, using a dynamic panel analysis of phrase
frequency over time, we found that partisan phrases increase their frequency in the public sphere
(measured by Google Books) before they are seen in Congress, suggesting that a component of
partisan rhetoric is being driven by intellectuals and the “pundit classes”. While this paper was
largely a description of empirical patterns, methodologically it shows how the analysis of large
datasets of language can be used to study the diffusion of ideas and political ideology. The paper
was one of the first to show the utility of the processed Congressional Record data for researchers
using "text-as-data" to study American political history (pursued for example by Gentzkow,
Shapiro, and Taddy (2016) in a recent methodological paper that highlights some of the finitesample issues in our earlier work). This paper was extensively discussed in a 2013 New Yorker
magazine article entitled “Long Division” by Jill Lepore.
Another recently completed paper, “Political Language in Economics” used computational
linguistics to inductively look at the politics of economists. In this paper, joint with Bruce Kogut
and Zubin Jelveh, we attempt to use natural language processing to measuring political orientations
in academic economics. We link the AEA roster to campaign contribution and petition signing
data, and then match the text of published academic articles to the political behavior of the authors.
We then use high-dimensional prediction tools to extract what phrases are correlated with
Republican and Democrat behavior, and show that this is quite a good out-of-sample predictor of
political ideology. That is: we can reliably predict somebody’s campaign contribution behavior
from their academic writing. We then explore patterns of ideology across fields, journals, and,
most interestingly, the correlation of ideology with empirical elasticities. According to our
estimates, scholars who are distinctly political in their style of academic writing, also report
different values of policy-relevant point estimates: economists whose writing is predictive of
Republican contributions report higher labor supply elasticities and lower fiscal multipliers.
These projects have resulted in a few co-authored methodological publications in top
computational linguistics conference proceedings. In "Historical Analysis of Legal Opinions
Using a Sparse Mixed-effects Latent Variable Model", published in proceedings of the 50th
meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2012, extended a topic model to
account for spatial and temporary heterogeneity, putting an economic interpretation on a canonical
topic model and applying it to judicial opinions about slavery in the 19th century. Another paper,
"Detecting Latent Ideology in Expert Text: Evidence From Academic Papers in Economics",
expanded the methodology developed in “Political Language in Economics” and compared it
favorably to other similar methods in NLP. This paper was published in the proceedings from the
2014 Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing.
One new project, joint with Bentley Macleod and Elliott Ash, integrates these tools with the theory
of incomplete contracts and labor unions. The NSF has awarded us a grant to digitize a sample of
collective bargaining agreements housed at Cornell, which span the 20th century, and we have
obtained the universe of collective bargaining agreements from Canada back to 1973 (these are
linked to strike outcomes as well). We then parse the language of the contracts into subject-verbobject sequences, focusing on the “deontic modal verbs”, verbs such as “shall, must, may, can”,
which create obligations and entitlements for employers, workers, and unions (the bilingual nature
of Canadian contracts gives us an opportunity to test the linguistic specificity of these methods).
We then use topic models to reduce the dimensionality of the objects of these verbs into an “action
space”. This allows a quantitative representation of the allocation of authority and control rights
specified in a contract (as in the incomplete contracts literature). Our preliminary design is to
estimate how wages and profits are traded off against authority and control in these contracts, using
variation in contract language induced by inflation, right-to-work laws, and NLRB court
precedents at the time of contract re-negotiation.
References
Card, D., Cardoso, A.R., Heining, J. and Kline, P., 2016. Firms and labor market inequality:
Evidence and some theory (No. w22850). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Clemens, M.A., 2011. Economics and emigration: Trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk?. The
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(3), pp.83-106.
Council of Economic Advisers. 2016. Labor market monopsony. Available at:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20161025_monopsony_labor
_mrkt_cea.pdf (last accessed March 6 2017)
Gentzkow, M., Shapiro, J.M. and Taddy, M., 2016. Measuring polarization in high-dimensional
data: Method and application to congressional speech (No. w22423). National Bureau of
Economic Research.
Fleisig, H., 1976. Slavery, the supply of agricultural labor, and the industrialization of the
South. The Journal of Economic History, 36(03), pp.572-597.
Fogel, R. W., & Engerman, S. L. (1974). Time on the cross: The economics of American Negro
slavery. WW Norton & Company.
La Porta, R., Lopez-de-Silanes, F. and Shleifer, A., 2008. The economic consequences of legal
origins. Journal of Economic Literature, 46(2), pp.285-332.
Manning, A., 2011. Imperfect competition in the labor market. Handbook of Labor Economics, 4,
pp.973-1041.
Milanovic, B., 2016. Global inequality. Harvard University Press.
Weyl, E.G., 2016. The openness-equality trade-off in global redistribution. Available at
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2509305 (last accessed March 6, 2017)
Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American economic development. Louisiana State University Press,
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Zitzewitz, E., 2012. Forensic economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 50(3), pp.731-769.
Recognitions/Awards
I am a 2015-2017 Sloan Foundation fellow. I am also an NBER faculty research fellow in the
Political Economy, Development of the American Economy, and Development groups. I was also
a CIFAR (Canadian Institute for Advanced Research) global fellow from 2011-2013, in the
Institutions, Organizations, and Development group.
Service
At Columbia, I have been the co-organizer of two workshops, political economy and development.
This year I am co-organizing the political economy workshop as well as the development
colloquium. I have co-organized two conferences on political economy at Columbia. I have been
on the program committee for the Society of Institutional and Organizational Economics 2017
conference, as well as the 2016 International Conference on Computational Social Science. I have
also been a co-organizer for the economic history association (EHA) annual meetings in 2015 in
Nashville, TN, and a member of the EHA research committee for the past 2 years, which decides
graduate fellowships, travel grants, and the Cole prize in economic history.
I have also been on junior faculty recruitment for both the department of economics and SIPA
(joint with political science on occasion), successfully filling a number of slots in the 2011-2012,
2012-2013, 2014-2015 and 2016-2017. I have also read sustainable development Ph.D.
applications, SIPA faculty grant applications, and economics Ph.D. applications.
Teaching
My non-Ph.D. teaching has primarily been in the Environmental and Science Policy (ESP)
program at SIPA. I have taught both micro and macro to the 2010-2011 class, and micro in fall
2011 and 2012. I consciously changed the 2-semester format from 2 semesters of micro to micro
and macro; given the financial crisis and the importance of green accounting and development, it
seemed that there was a high demand for macroeconomics from the students. The micro class has
been challenging to teach, as it is mandatory for all ESP students, and there is a high degree of
heterogeneity. I try to focus the microeconomic theory so that students can understand and interpret
consumer and producer surplus as well as deadweight loss and social vs private costs. With these
core ideas, expressed graphically and with simple algebra, students can calculate how much
policies hurt and help different groups. This dovetails with my political economy interests:
microeconomics very clearly illuminates the economic incidence of policies and externalities,
often providing a parsimonious explanation of the observed political conflicts. For example,
conflicts over carbon taxes can be seen very clearly in the inelastic demand curves and limited
entry facing the oil industry. While the optimal solution is often easy to characterize in elementary
microeconomics, the politically feasible solution is sometimes trickier.
While teaching this course I have become involved in the CORE economy textbook project, a large
collaborative effort to produce a high quality, open-source, free (with Oxford University Press
offering a print edition for sale), principles of economics book that is more reflective of the range
of questions and tools economics has to offer. I have coauthored the CORE units on inequality
(with Sam Bowles) and on Political Economy (with Tim Besley). CORE is now in use at Sciences
Po, UCL, Dartmouth, Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad de Chile, LUMS, and Azim Premji
University, and I have successfully experimented with it in the SIPA ESP program
microeconomics class.
The inequality chapter of CORE is also the basis for my other SIPA teaching, which is a seminar
on global inequality for master’s students. This course teaches both the philosophical questions
around within vs across country inequality, as well as the empirical analysis and measurement of
inequality.
In fall semesters, I have been teaching a Ph.D. class in the political economy of long-run
development, which highlights the empirical literature in this area as well as covering core
theoretical models in political economy. Historical persistence of institutions, models of voting,
and empirical analysis of developing country (and historical) political economy issues are all
featured prominently.
I have also been a very active Ph.D. advisor, sitting on at least one committee a year since my
arrival. This has been recognized with a “Best Ph.D. Advisor” award from the Columbia
association of economics graduate students (AGES) in 2016. I would count myself primary advisor
currently to at least 3 Ph.D. students in Economics and 1-2 in Sustainable development and
secondary advisor to many more. My primary advisees who have gone on to academic jobs include
Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, who is now assistant faculty at U.C. Berkeley Haas, Elliott Ash who is
starting as faculty at the University of Warwick, David Blakeslee at NYU-Abu Dhabi, Belinda
Archibong at Barnard College, Soule Sow at Bilikent University, and Chris Boone who is at
Cornell (Hotel Management). Students I have been secondary advisors to have gone on to assistant
professor positions at UCLA, Wellesley College, SUNY Binghamton, Stockholm School of
Economics, and the University of Sao Paulo.
Published Papers
“Start-Up Nation? Slave Wealth and Entrepreneurship in Civil War Maryland” (with Felipe Gonzalez
and Guillermo Marshall) -Forthcoming at the Journal of Economic History
“Labor Market Institutions in the Gilded Age of American Economic History” (with Noam
Yuchtman)-Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, edited by Lou
Cain, Price Fishback, and Paul Rhode.
“Monopsony in Migrant Labor Markets: Evidence from the United Arab Emirates” (with Yaw Nyarko
and Shing-Yi Wang) - Journal of Political Economy Vol. 124 (6) (December 2016):1735-1792. (Lead
Article)
“Intergenerational Mobility and Institutional Change in 20th Century China” (with Yuyu Chen,
Tinghua Yu, and Noam Yuchtman) - Explorations in Economic History Vol. 58 (March 2015): 44-73.
“Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality” (with Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Pascual
Restrepo) - Handbook of Income Distribution, edited by Anthony Atkinson and Francois
Bourguignon.
“Bases, Bullets, and Ballots: The Effect of U.S. Military Aid on Political Conflict in Colombia” (with
Oeindrila Dube) - Journal of Politics Vol. 7 (1) (January 2015): 249-267.
"Detecting Latent Ideology in Expert Text: Evidence From Academic Papers in Economics"
(with Zubin Jelveh and Bruce Kogut) - Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language
Processing 2014.
“When the Levees Broke: Black Migration and Economic Development in the U.S. South” (with
Richard Hornbeck) - American Economic Review Vol.104(3) (March 2014) :963-90
"Political Polarization and the Dynamics of Political Language: Evidence from 140 Years of
Congressional Speech" (with Jacob Jensen, Ethan Kaplan, and Laurence Wilse-Samson) Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Vol. 2012 (2) (February 2013):1-81 (Lead Article)
"Historical Analysis of Legal Opinions Using a Sparse Mixed-effects Latent Variable Model" with
William Wang, Elijah Mayfield, and Jeremiah Dittmar. -Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting
of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2012.
“Coercive Contract Enforcement: Law and the Labor Market in 19th Century Industrial Britain” (with
Noam Yuchtman) -American Economic Review Vol. 103(1) (February 2013):107-144
“Coups, Corporations, and Classified Information” (with Arindrajit Dube and Ethan Kaplan)
-Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 126(3) (July 2011): 1375-1409
“Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies”
(with Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Samuel Bowles, Tom Hertz, et al.)- Science Vol. 326. No.
5953 (October 30, 2009), pp 682-688.
“Equilibrium Selection with Idiosyncratic Intentional Play” (with Samuel Bowles and Sung-Ha
Hwang)- Economics Letters Vol. 109, No. 1 (October 2010), pp. 31-33.
“The Economic Determinants of Land Invasions” (with Danny Hidalgo, Simeon Nichter, and Neal
Richardson) – Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 92, No. 3 (August, 2010), pp. 505-523.
“Recruitment Restrictions and Labor Markets: Evidence from the Post-Bellum U.S. South,” - Journal
of Labor Economics. Vol. 28, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 413-445.
“The Economic Impacts of a Citywide Minimum Wage” (with Arindrajit Dube and Michael Reich)
-Industrial and Labor Relations Review Vol. 60, No. 4 (July 2007), pp. 522-543.