Title: Are U.S. State Tax Policies Increasingly Polarized? (joint with Sarah Robinson).

Abstract: Using data on U.S. state tax policies from 1910 to 2022, we study to what extent political polarization permeates U.S. state tax policies. Our comprehensive analysis considers a variety of tax measures and definitions of "Democratic" vs. "Republican" states. We document a small increase in tax policy polarization in recent decades, particularly for personal and corporate income, as well as cigarette taxes, and among states with stable political regimes. However, we find that current levels of polarization are not unique relative to the past. Furthermore, the timing of polarization varies widely across tax policies, and is not consistent with measures of increasing political polarization from the literature.

Title: Identification of Nonlinear Dynamic Panels under Partial Stationarity

Title: Causal Claims (joint work with Prashant Garg (Imperial)).

Abstract: Economic research has experienced a profound shift towards establishing causal relationships using an ever expanding suite of empirical methods. Despite this "credibility revolution," there is limited comprehensive analysis of how these methods and causal claims have evolved across economics subfields. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing over 44,000 NBER and CEPR working papers using a custom large language model to extract structured information on authorship, empirical methods, underlying data and associated causal claims. We use this data to document the empiricisation of economics research with a significant growth in the use of methods like Difference-in-Differences, Instrumental Variables, and Randomized Controlled Trials, alongside an increase in the number of causal claims that are made and evidenced. Yet, nearly 30% of causal claims remain unsupported by rigorous identification strategies. We also observe rising narrative complexity and increased use of private data, raising concerns about transparency, replicability and property rights attached to knowledge goods that are produced using private data. Our findings highlight the evolving landscape of empirical economics, emphasizing the need for continued focus on methodological rigor and data accessibility. This study contributes to a better understanding of research practices in economics and informs efforts to enhance the credibility and transparency of the discipline.

Title: How Social Structure Drives Innovation: Surname Diversity and Patents in U.S. HistoryLink opens in a new window, with Jonathan Schulz and Joseph HenrichLink opens in a new window

Title: Designing collaborative activities using Moodle

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Title: Talking Across the Aisle, (joint work with Luca Braghieri and Peter Schwardmann).

Title: Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction (with Ana Tur-Prats)

Nearly half of all known languages in the world are under threat of extinction or are already extinct. What are the determinants of language extinction? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep-rooted gender norms and its language’s risk of extinction: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction compared to those from male-dominant societies. We measure language status and male-dominance using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats, 2023), respectively, for a sample of 4,763 languages in 172 countries. Our results show that the negative relationship between male dominance and language extinction holds even after accounting for fundamental determinants of economic development and societal collapse at the language-group level, such as geography, conflict exposure, climate variability, and historical factors, as well as after the inclusion of country fixed effects. We then investigate the impact of inter-group relationships in the context of colonialism by relating each indigenous group to its colonizer in a dyadic setting. We find that societies with more gender-equal norms than those of their colonizers are significantly more prone to language extinction. Cultural distance in gender norms from the colonizer is a stronger predictor of language extinction than the characteristics of either the colonizer or the indigenous group itself.

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Title: Endogenous Clustering and Analogy-Based Expectation Equilibrium

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Title: Malthusian Migrations (with Romain Wacziarg)

We argue that societies with higher fertility experience increased levels of emigration. During the Age of Mass Migration, persistently high fertility created a large reservoir of surplus labor that could find better opportunities in the New World. We denote such migrations, from labor-abundant to land-abundant regions, as Malthusian migrations. Our results hold in a variety of datasets and specifications, across countries, regions, individuals, and periods. Using linguistic distance from French and twin births as instruments for fertility in crowdsourced genealogical data, we estimate a large effect of fertility on out-migration. Within households, later born children were more likely to migrate as fertility increased, particularly in regions with egalitarian inheritance. We develop a Malthusian model allowing for emigration as a way to escape population pressures, alleviating the negative effects of high fertility and contributing to the emergence of modern economic growth.

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Title: Optimally Coarse Contracts (joint work with Roberto Corrao and Karthik Sastry).

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