The #econhist class of 23/24

From canals, clans and credit to monuments, missionaries and medicine

The economics job market is more than an application process; it’s a rite of passage for those who seek to shape the future of economics. Below, I list, in alphabetical order, the job market candidates with an economic history specialisation. I asked ChatGPT to summarise their job market paper for a 12-year-old.

I apply three criteria for inclusion: First, they must list on their website that they are on the job market. Second, they must have a job market paper available. Third, they must list economic history as a primary or secondary interest, or I must judge their JMP to be of sufficient interest to economic historians. (This is a living page. If you are a job market candidate and would like to be added, please email me. If you are included and would like to be removed, ask.)

Two more things before we get going: the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP), the research unit I head at Stellenbosch University, is advertising two postdoc positions in economic history. If you’re on the market, please consider applying. Second, if you’re work is about a region outside Western Europe and the US, please consider submitting your work to Economic History of Developing Regions.

The Job Market Candidates for 2023/2024

Madison Arnsbarger (Pittsburgh): Arnsbarger looks at how the increase in women working in traditionally male jobs during World War I influenced political support for the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote. She finds that a significant increase in women’s participation in the workforce during the war was linked to a higher chance of congressmen supporting the Nineteenth Amendment, suggesting that women working in the market helped expand their political rights.

Kentaro Asai (PSE): Asai investigates how the loss of young males during World War II, particularly in Japan, affected the country’s post-war industrial structure due to changes in gender balance in specific cohorts and areas. He finds that areas with a greater loss of young males experienced slower industrialisation after the war, but this effect was quantitatively limited.

Kartikeya Batra (Maryland): Batra investigates how unequal land ownership in north India in the 1820s affected the region’s economic development in the long run. He finds that redistributing land led to more ownership of durable assets, non-farm jobs, and education, even benefiting lower caste families who didn’t receive land, as these families became less likely to follow restrictive social norms, showing how land ownership patterns can influence economic development through non-economic ways.

Marie Beigelman (Barcelona): Beigelman investigates how the violence faced by enslaved workers during slavery in Guadeloupe and Martinique affected their families, especially their children, after slavery was abolished. The main discovery was that children were 40% more likely to die if their fathers had experienced the worst conditions during slavery, suggesting that the trauma and possibly violent behaviour passed down from these fathers significantly harmed their children’s living environment.

José Belmar (Brown): Belmar explores how access to international trade, particularly through the Panama Canal, affected population growth and structural changes in Colombia’s economy, which has a strong agricultural sector. Colombian regions that gained access to international markets through the Panama Canal saw higher population growth and faster changes in their economic structure, with the greatest shifts in labour moving towards services in regions between ports and agricultural areas, illustrating the varied impacts of international trade within a country.

Kabeer Bora (Utah): Bora investigates how the transfer of surplus (wealth) from colonial India to Britain contributed to the development and profitability of the British economy. He finds that the movement of capital from India to Britain significantly enhanced the British economy, with a doubling of the colonial drain increasing Britain’s profit rate by about 10%, based on a detailed examination of colonial accounting and economic data.

Björn Brey (Oxford): Brey looks at how the decrease in global trade (de-globalization) affected politics in Weimar Germany, especially the rise of the Nazi party. He finds that the Nazi party’s success was not directly due to the decline in exports in manufacturing areas, but rather due to the drop in food prices that hurt rural areas, along with the Nazi party’s policies that supported agriculture.

Gabe Brown (Vancouver School of Economics): Brown explores the long-term effects of translating the Bible into African languages on education and health in those areas. Areas with historical Bible translations had better education and health outcomes, partly because the translations brought more missionaries who built things like schools and hospitals, and these languages were later used in schools after independence, benefiting education but not health in the same way.

Caterina Chiopris (Harvard): Chiopris looks at how increased connections, like railroads, affected the creation and sharing of new ideas in 19th-century Germany. She finds that while railroads helped generate more new ideas by allowing scholars to specialise in specific topics, this specialisation actually reduced the spread of these ideas because groups focused on different areas became more isolated from each other.

William M Cockriel (Booth): Cockriel looks at how a new machine, the McKay stitcher, which made shoe-making less skilled, affected shoemakers and their children in the late 19th century. The McKay stitcher led to skilled shoemakers earning less money, not moving to other places for work, and their children ending up in lower-paying jobs, with both the shoemakers and their children losing about 2-3 years’ worth of wages in their lifetimes.

Davide Coluccia (Northwestern): Coluccia investigates how migration influences the spread of innovation from a migrant’s destination country (the United States) to their country of origin (the United Kingdom). Using data on British immigrants in the US and UK patents, he finds that migration ties helped transfer technology and knowledge from the US to the UK, both through immigrants returning home and through their ongoing connections with their origin communities, thus enhancing innovation in the UK.

Julián Costas-Fernández (University College London): Costas-Fernández explores whether access to the railroad network in nineteenth-century England and Wales increased the chances of children choosing different occupations than their parents and achieving upward mobility. He finds that sons who lived about 5 km closer to a train station were 2% more likely to have a different occupation than their fathers and 6% more likely to move up in social status, mainly due to changes in local labor opportunities.

Wentian Diao (National University of Singapore): Diao investigates how clans in modern China affect local governments, particularly in the context of land parcel pricing in China’s primary land market. She finds that firms with clan connections got land at 1.3%-3.0% lower prices due to collusion with bidders and local government officials, which initially led to reduced economic growth at the county level, but this impact turned positive during China’s anti-corruption campaign.

Francesco Ferlenga (Brown): Ferlenga examines how the presence of Confederate monuments in the US South, symbols of southern white power and opposed by African Americans, affected the migration patterns of African Americans both historically and today. He finds that counties with Confederate monuments saw a significant decrease in African American population due to out-migration, both historically and in the present, with African Americans today requiring higher wages and being less likely to accept job offers in cities with these monuments.

Da Gong (UC Riverside): Gong looks at how traumatic events, like the Great Chinese Famine, affected people’s trust in each other, especially in areas with strong clan cultures and different levels of social capital. He finds that in areas with high initial social capital and strong clan cultures, traumatic experiences like the famine actually increased trust among clan members.

Joung Yeob Ha (Pittsburgh): Ha investigates how the US government’s inclusive propaganda during World War I influenced the cultural assimilation of immigrants. He finds that immigrants in cities with more of this propaganda were more likely to become citizens, marry Americans, name their children with American names, and actively support the country by buying war bonds and saving food, especially if they were culturally different from Americans.

Joseph Peterson Hall (Stanford Graduate School of Business): Hall examines how the shift from merchant-extended short-term consumer credit to bank-issued credit cards in the United States before 1970 impacted merchant profits. He finds that a 20% decrease in merchant lending due to the increased use of bank credit cards led to about a 4% increase in net entry (a proxy for merchant profits), particularly for small firms, with this profit increase mainly driven by banks’ lower labor costs and better risk management.

Oliver Kim (Berkeley): Kim examines if the Household Responsibility System (HRS), a major agricultural reform in China starting in 1978, actually improved agricultural productivity as widely believed. Using satellite images to measure crop yields, he finds no evidence that areas adopting the HRS earlier had better growth in yields, challenging the common belief that this reform was key to China’s rapid economic growth.

Julius Koschnick (LSE): Koschnick explores how teachers influenced the direction of research during the English Scientific Revolution in Oxford and Cambridge universities. By analyzing a new dataset of 111,242 students and their publications, he finds strong evidence that teachers significantly directed students’ research interests, contributing to the success and direction of the English Scientific Revolution.

Masahiro Kubo (Brown): The study investigates how the adoption of a common language and the construction of a national identity and ideology in France were influenced by state intervention in education. He finds that state-led educational efforts led to the homogenisation of language and national identity in France, with elites and the demand for education playing key roles in this process, and this homogenisation had lasting effects, including increased participation in the French Resistance and reduced collaboration with the Nazis, as well as more support for political centralisation.

Lukas Leucht (Berkeley): Leucht investigates if politicians in New York City between 1900 and 1916 used public sector jobs, specifically in the police department, as a way to gain votes and how this affected job performance. He finds that about 21% of police officers were hired through political connections rather than merit, which increased voter registration for the Democratic Party in their neighbourhoods, but these patronage-hired officers performed worse than those selected based on merit.

Sophie Li (Boston): Li investigates how the postmaster occupation, which was open and friendly to married women, affected women’s employment in the early 20th-century United States. She finds that while the postmaster role attracted women who were not previously employed, it offered little long-term employment benefit, with a significant drop in employment after their term ended, partly due to discrimination against married women working and the impact of the Great Depression.

Resem Makan (Washington): Makan explores the long-term effects on education, wealth, and social dynamics in regions of northeast India that were historically tribal but absorbed into the British administrative system. Regions that were under British administration now have higher levels of schooling, literacy, and wealth, better public services, and less agricultural labour, with a notable development of stronger social identification beyond kinship, showing persistent effects even 70 years after India’s independence.

Carlo Medici (Northwestern): Medici examines how immigration in the early 20th century United States influenced the development of organised labour and union membership. He finds that counties with more immigrants saw an increase in labour union presence and membership, especially among skilled workers’ unions, as a response to labour competition and cultural differences, indicating that immigration was a significant factor in the growth of labour unions during this period.

Laura Montenegro (Harris School): The study examines how increased market integration influenced the national identity choices of white settlers in colonial South Africa. She finds that greater market access led white settlers to either adopt a British or Afrikaner identity, driven by market access’s impact on racial mobility and attitudes towards apartheid, with no significant influence from other factors like religious beliefs.

Megumi Murakami (Northwestern): Murakami examines why medical technology developed slowly compared to other natural sciences over two millennia, using a game theory model involving physicians and patients. The slow progress in medical technology is attributed to patients’ bias towards old methods, limited accuracy in physicians’ knowledge, and intense competition, with the latter leading physicians to stick to old technology to attract patients who prefer traditional methods.

Vinicius Okada Da Silva (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Okada Da Silva investigates the long-term effects of Jesuit missions on human capital and development in the Brazilian Amazon. He finds that areas close to former Jesuit missions in the Brazilian Amazon had higher literacy rates in both 1872 and 2010, indicating a lasting positive impact of these missions on education, independent of demographic differences or the number of schools.

Tom Raster (PSE): Raster explores how individual pioneers, the first to establish trade links between ports, affected overall trade, particularly in the Baltic Sea region from 1500 to the 1850s. He finds that pioneering voyages significantly increased trade, with a single pioneering voyage boosting a town’s exports by 25–33% for the connections that lasted, and that 10% of total trade value was due to recent pioneering, highlighting the importance of policies encouraging pioneering with distant destinations.

Manasvi Sharma (UC Irvine): Sharma investigates how the 1848 Public Health Act in England and Wales, which introduced sanitation measures, impacted the long-term health and intergenerational mobility of individuals. She finds that sons who were exposed to the Act in early childhood were more likely to have different and better-ranked occupations than their fathers, often moving away from farming and unskilled jobs to skilled or semiskilled ones, suggesting that improved early childhood health led to better economic opportunities and skills like literacy.

Lovepreet Singh (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign): Singh investigates the role of the British State, particularly the Ordnance Office, in the Industrial Revolution, focusing on how its practices influenced technology, labor skills, and industrial organization in other sectors and the long-term effects of Civil War-era armament production on US manufacturing and innovation. The study reveals that the British Ordnance Office significantly contributed to the Industrial Revolution by training workers, implementing labour division, and influencing other sectors and that Civil War-era armament production had lasting impacts on manufacturing and innovation in the United States.

Mariama Sow (Michigan State): Sow investigates how the development of infrastructure, specifically roads, affects ethnic and national identity in post-colonial Africa. She discovered that living near a paved road actually decreases people’s attachment to their nation and increases their attachment to their ethnic group, partly because better roads improve communication technology, which strengthens ethnic social networks, and also because people see more government corruption in these infrastructure projects, reducing their trust in the government and national identity.

Karan Talathi (UC Irvine): The study investigates how the creation of a new state (Chhattisgarh) and its governing institutions affected local economic growth and development compared to neighbouring areas still governed by the old state (Madhya Pradesh) in India. Villages in Chhattisgarh near the border experienced significant economic growth compared to their counterparts in Madhya Pradesh, due to better governance, effective industrial policies, improved public services, efficient administration, and closer proximity to the state capital.

Alexander Taylor (GMU): Taylor looks into how Confederate monuments, built after the Civil War in the southern US, affected politics and society in those areas from 1878 to 1912. He discovered that these monuments led to more people voting for the Democratic party, fewer people voting in general, and a decrease in the percentage of Black residents in those areas, with different effects depending on the monument’s features and the racial composition of the county.

Fatou Thioune (USC): Thioune explores why Mauritius and Senegal, two similar African countries, have experienced different economic growth and changes in their economic structures. The main reason for their different economic growth paths is total factor productivity (TFP), with Mauritius moving towards sectors with fast TFP growth and Senegal towards those with slower TFP growth. If Senegal had the same sectoral TFP growth as Mauritius, its GDP per capita could have grown 1.5% faster each year from 1980 to 2019.

Miriam Venturini (Zurich): Venturini looks at whether exposing corruption within US labour unions in the late 1950s had any unintended negative effects. She finds that the public exposure of corruption had a stronger negative impact on union membership and their ability to get people to vote in areas not directly involved in the investigation, likely due to a widespread negative perception of unions created by the exposure.

Sarah Vincent (Aix Marseille School of Economics): Vincent examines if a government-mandated male sterilization program in India in 1976 led to an increase in male-perpetrated violence, especially against women. She finds that areas with more intense implementation of the sterilisation program saw a 7% increase in violent crime rates, particularly against women, with rapes increasing by 22%, likely due to the trauma from the procedure and its impact on perceptions of masculinity, in districts with more harmful gender norms.

Hillary Vipond (LSE): Vipond investigates how mechanization in the bootmaking industry during the 19th century in Great Britain affected job creation and loss, focusing on the specific tasks within the industry. She finds that about 152,000 bootmaking jobs were lost due to obsolete skills, while 144,000 new jobs requiring different skills emerged; these new jobs were mostly filled by young workers, with older incumbents not transitioning to the new roles, altering the employment landscape for the younger generation.

Jinlin Wei (Warwick): Wei investigates how short-term credit from country banks during England and Wales’ Industrial Revolution (1750-1825) affected innovation, particularly in terms of patenting. He finds that better access to financial services from these banks significantly increased patenting activity, indicating that short-term loans helped fuel innovation by providing necessary working capital, especially in areas with tighter credit constraints.

Laura Weiwu (MIT): Weiwu examines how the Interstate highway system in America affected racial inequality, focusing on the role of institutional segregation in its different impacts. She finds that highways caused environmental harm in urban areas and benefits through reduced commute times, disproportionately affecting Black populations due to their concentration in central areas and low mobility, largely because of institutional barriers like redlining; removing these barriers would significantly reduce the racial welfare gap.

Yiyu Xing (Auburn): Xing examines how the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act, which set safety standards for electronic products emitting radiation, affected innovation in the medical equipment industry. She finds that after this act, companies increased their inventions in making safer diagnostic X-ray equipment (by about 50%) and also increased innovations in new radiation-based medical devices (by about 54%), leading to significant improvements in health and market value.

Youwei Xing (Clemson): Xing examines the effect of the Erie Canal, built in the 19th century, on sectoral transition and long-term economic growth in towns of New York State. Towns near the Erie Canal saw faster population and manufacturing employment growth, a decrease in agriculture jobs, and an increase in commerce jobs, driven by the development of small-scale manufacturing and commercial activities due to lower transportation costs and easier market access, with these effects diminishing beyond 15-20 km from the canal.

Ziming Zhu (LSE): Zhu investigates how likely it was for sons in England between 1851 and 1911 to have similar jobs and social status as their fathers. After improving the way they measured the data, he finds that sons were more likely to have similar jobs and social status as their fathers than previously thought, showing that Victorian England had limited chances for people to move up in society.

‘The #econhist class of 23/24’ was first published on Our Long Walk. Anya Nash provided helpful research assistance. Support more such writing by signing up for a paid subscription. The image was created with Midjourney v5.2.