Research

This paper examines how technological change affects social cohesion in culturally diverse societies. I study the electrification of U.S. manufacturing between 1900 and 1940, a period of intense industrial transformation and high immigration. Electrification reorganized manufacturing production by replacing steam power with decentralized electric motors, reducing the need for close coordination among workers on the factory floor. This shift allowed firms to hire employees from more diverse backgrounds and may have lowered barriers to integration in the workplace. I link newly digitized maps of the high-voltage grid to full-count U.S. census data and exploit the staggered rollout of electrification in a difference-in-differences framework. I first study changes within industries. Electrification increased the share of immigrant workers, raised ethnic diversity, and reduced occupational segregation along ethnic lines. I then examine local community outcomes. Residential segregation among manufacturing workers declined, and intermarriage between immigrant and U.S.-born spouses increased, while naming practices show no change. Finally, I study native backlash against immigration, measured by employment in local public service occupations. As in earlier work, immigrant presence reduced public good provision, but electrification attenuated this effect, suggesting that greater integration in work and residence eased social tensions. Taken together, the results show that technological change can foster social cohesion by reshaping labor markets and community life. Electrification not only raised productivity but also contributed to immigrant integration and more cohesive communities.

Presentations: [* Scheduled]

ASSA Annual Meeting 2026 (Philadelphia)*; ASREC Europe Conference 2025 (University of Copenhagen);  CAE Annual Meetings 2025 (Université du Québec à Montréal); CNEH Conference 2025 (Université de Montréal); EHA Annual Meeting 2025 (Philadelphia) [poster]; NBER Summer Institute 2025 – Development of the American Economy [poster]; UEA North American Meeting 2025 (Université du Québec à Montréal); University of Maryland, Baltimore County;  UBC Development/Political Economy Lunch; UBC Trade/Spatial Lunch; Virtual Economic History Workshop.

Integration of immigrants is a key topic in the global economy today. New waves of co-ethnic immigrants can make assimilation less valuable, since the group becomes larger, but could also increase the incentive for incumbents to differentiate themselves from recent arrivals when threatened by discrimination from natives. Can frictions between waves of migrants shape the economic choices of incumbents? How do incumbents respond to the arrival of co-ethnic newcomers in terms of assimilation choices? We answer these questions in the context of two waves of Jewish migrants to the United States –the first predominantly German, arriving between 1840 and 1880, and the latter arriving primarily from the Russian Empire between 1880 and WWI– that differed dramatically along cultural dimensions. Taking advantage of records from a Jewish genealogical website, we develop a novel methodology to accurately identify Jews in the US census. Then, we digitize and geolocate data on Jewish institutions across the US between 1890 and 1927. Combining these sources with individual census data, we assess the evolution of Jewish life after the arrival of the second wave of migrants. Preliminary results suggest that incumbents are increasingly Americanizing their names while decreasing other margins of assimilation. 

Presentations:

NBER 2025 – Linking Historical Data Sources for Small Populations; UBC Development/Political Economy Lunch.

This study examines how immigrant workers respond to negative economic shocks, focusing on geographic and occupational mobility during the Great Depression. Using individual-level data that links foreign-born individuals across the 1920 and 1930 U.S. censuses, I analyze differences by cohorts, defined by the years of residence in the United States. Immigrants who had lived in the country for more than 25 years by 1920 serve as the reference group, as they are likely more assimilated and thus closer to natives in their labor market behavior. Preliminary results show that recent immigrants were highly mobile in response to the crisis. All immigrant groups responded to the Depression with geographic mobility, though the effect was strongest among those with shorter residence in the United States. Immigrants who had been in the country for fewer years were more likely to move to a different state or county and to shift from rural to urban areas between 1920 and 1930. Among those with less than ten years in the U.S. in 1920, employment responses went further: conditional on being employed, these recent immigrants were more likely to change industry, sector, or occupation compared to the previous decade. Across all immigrant groups, however, employment after the Depression was more often in lower-scoring occupations. This downward occupational mobility affected immigrants regardless of their time in the U.S., though the effect was strongest among the most recent arrivals.  

This project studies the long-run impact of historical conflict on social preferences in Europe. We geolocate nearly 2,800 battles between 1 and 1900 CE and manually classify them by actors involved, prevailing party, type of violence, motives, and intensity. Combining this information with individual-level measures from the Global Preference Survey, we investigate how variation in historical conflict exposure across regions is related to patience, risk-taking, prosociality, and trust today. We find that regions historically more exposed to conflict exhibit greater patience but lower prosociality and risk-taking, with the effects being strongest for intense conflicts, such as sieges, retaliatory battles, and territorial conquests. These results suggest that repeated exposure to conflict becomes embedded in local collective memory and continues to shape cultural traits and individual behavior over the long run, contributing to broader discussions on the cultural and psychological legacy of conflict.

Presentations:

ASREC Conference 2025 (George Mason University); CESifo Venice Summer Institute 2025 – Poverty, Persistence and Policy: Comparative Development and the Deep Roots of Prosperity; UBC Development/Political Economy Lunch.

Conflict remains a persistent feature of Africa’s recent history. While often linked to ethnic divisions and resource disputes, anecdotal evidence suggests that religion also plays an important role. Yet, formally identifying the role of religion is difficult, as religious divisions frequently overlap with ethnic cleavages, historical rivalries, and socioeconomic inequalities. To better understand the religious component of violence, this project uses the ACLED database, which records about 350,000 geolocated violent events across 58 African countries between 1997 and 2023. We identify religiously related events in two ways: (i) by manually classifying the more than 18,000 actors listed in ACLED, defining as “religious” those whose names or secondary sources indicate a religious affiliation; and (ii) by analyzing event descriptions, which often provide additional clues about religious dimensions beyond actor labels. To capture this, we manually label a random sample of 5,300 event descriptions and construct a list of religious keywords. We then apply this keyword list to the full database, classifying an event as religious if its description contains at least one of these terms. Combining both approaches, we find that 24.1% of violent events reported in Africa between 1997 and 2023 have a religious dimension. Of these, 69.35\% involve at least one actor related to Jihad, while only 3.11% involve a political actor with a religious dimension. Only a small share, 3.70%, involves two religious actors; within this, in just over half of these cases (52.11%), both actors belong to the same religion (intra-faith violence).

Presentations:

Max Planck Summer School 2024 – Political Economy of Conflict and Redistribution (Berlin).

This project studies how assimilation policies targeting American Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries affected individualism, ethnic identity, and attitudes towards the U.S. government, as measured through the clauses and language used in over 350 newly digitised tribal constitutions and charters. We first demonstrate that there is meaningful variation in the types of clauses (e.g., blood quantum or residence restrictions on membership) and language (e.g., emphasising the “tribe” or the “individual”) across constitutions. We then examine how tribal characteristics and historical exposure to government policies – such as Indian schools and land allotment – affected constitutional features. Finally, we employ natural language processing techniques to measure the extent to which these characteristics affected trust and cooperation with the U.S. government during the Indian New Deal, as measured by semantic similarity between constitutions written in the 1930s and a ‘model’ constitution distributed by the Indian Office at the time. This project contributes to our understanding of how assimilation policies influenced Indigenous institutional development and political culture, highlighting the long-term effects of government intervention on tribal sovereignty, collective identity, and intergovernmental relations in American Indian Nations.