Research

This paper studies how historically persistent land tenure institutions shape agricultural productivity, factor allocation, and structural transformation, exploiting quasi-random variation generated by the decentralized implementation of the 1975 Ethiopian land reform. Prior to reform, kinship-based rist tenure and hierarchical gult claims governed land rights in much of the northern highlands. Although the reform formally abolished feudal holdings, land allocation and dispute resolution were delegated to local Peasant Associations (PAs), generating sharp institutional discontinuities across adjacent communities. We digitize PA boundaries and land redistribution records and combine them with historical agricultural censuses and parish-level archives. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design at PA borders, we find that communities subject to more intensive redistribution exhibit 12–18 percent higher land fragmentation, 20 percent lower land rental activity, and 8–12 percent lower agricultural productivity. These effects operate through tenure insecurity, thinner land markets, and distortions to local risk-sharing and information networks. The results highlight how persistent customary institutions interact with reform implementation to generate long-run misallocation, offering a micro-founded explanation for slow structural transformation in agrarian economies.

This paper studies how culturally embedded beliefs shape labor contracts and productivity in agricultural wage labor. Focusing on sugarcane plantations in Colombia’s Cauca Valley, we analyze the role of monicongos—figurine-based ritual practices associated with “devil contracts”—which are widely believed to generate unusually high output at severe spiritual cost. Drawing on plantation payroll archives, household surveys, and original field experiments, we show that belief intensity in monicongos acts as a form of perceived catastrophic risk that constrains feasible incentive schemes. Across veredas, stronger beliefs are associated with significantly flatter wage contracts: a one–standard deviation increase in belief intensity reduces the probability of piece-rate pay by 18–25 percent and lowers the slope of incentive pay by 0.12 standard deviations. Within plantations, high-belief areas exhibit 30 percent lower variance in individual productivity and reduced take-up of bonus contracts when experimentally offered. Using exogenous shifts in historical Afro–Colombian outmigration from the Pacific lowlands during "La Violencia" (1925-1958), a period of political violence in Colombian history, as an instrument for contemporary belief intensity in sugarcane veredas, we estimate a structural “spiritual risk” parameter that rationalizes observed contract menus and investment responses. The findings highlight how non-material beliefs can endogenously shape labor institutions and aggregate productivity.

This paper studies how anti-trust enforcement shaped consolidation and the realization of economies of scale during the rapid expansion of US streetcar systems in the early 20th century. We build a new firm-level dataset from the universe of streetcar and related transit companies recorded in McGraw Business Manuals (1900-1956), complemented with digitized information from engineering and transit journals. We link firms across editions to trace ownership structure, service area, capitalization, and operational characteristics over time. We then combine these data with measures of regulatory pressure and enforcement intensity under the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914) to examine how legal constraints affected mergers, network integration embedded in railway structure, and firm scale. Using variation across cities and years, we estimate the impact of anti-trust enforcement on market structure and outcomes consistent with scale economies, such as unit costs, service expansion, and organizational integration. The results shed light on how legal institutions can shape the evolution of network industries in periods of rapid urban growth.

This paper studies the following research question: What are the consequences of historical ethnic conflict on contemporary levels of social capital? This question is relevant, since understanding the consequences of historical ethnic violence on contemporary social capital can provide useful inputs to design effective State-building policies. I exploit Mfecane, a period of ethnic upheaval in South African history, as a setting to examine the causal effects of historical ethnic conflict on contemporary levels of social capital. For this end, I use a combination of a historical approximation of the Mfecane warzone with geocoded data from the Afrobarometer project (2000–2016). Using an instrumental variables strategy, I find that historical ethnic conflict decreases contemporary trust in people among individuals living within the borders of Mfecane, while increasing trust in relatives and neighbors. Increases in in-group trust appear to be driven by the long run persistence of parochial altruism. Conversely, lower levels of between-group trust can be explained by the lack of economic incentives to cooperate with strangers in former warzones. Furthermore, I find that group selection dynamics are partially driving these differential effects, by fostering group-based affect and intergroup prejudice among contemporary descendants of historically conflicting groups. These results are suggestive of a degree of substitutability between in-group and between-group social capital, at the community level.