I'm a Professor in the Economics Department at George Mason University.

My research interests include:

• The historical origins of modern liberal institutions. You can purchase my book (written with Mark Koyama) here: Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom. Here's a piece I wrote on why the cover of the book is cool: "Paintings, Persecutions, and Political Development".
• The relationship between state capacity and economic growth.
• The impact of environmental shocks on institutional change and economic and social outcomes.
• Applied Econometrics with a particular emphasis on spatial and text data.

What’s New?

10-14-2024: I was at the Markets and Society Conference over the weekend. Was happy to present some new work on "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India". Here are the presentation slides.

9-12-2024: Excited to be working on some new research on "Plague, Print, and Persecution: The Role of Print Media in Shaping Social Responses to Epidemics in Early-Modern Europe". Alex Taylor and I are basically looking at whether European cities that were hit by a plague recurrence between 1450 and 1650 were more likely to publish books that were antisemitic or focused on witch hunting. Guess where most of the antisemetic books were being published?

6-3-2024: I had a great time helping organize the Cliometric Society Meetings that happened last weekend. A great selection of papers and always fun to meet new people and catch up with old friends.

3-8-2024: I had a great time doing a seminar and workshop on Text as Data for Applied Social Science at the University of Mississippi. You can look at my slides here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

10-2-2023: Our paper Pandemics, Places, and Populations: The Effects of the Black Death on Urban Development has been accepted at the Journal of Urban Economics. We're happy to see this one in print.

9-28-2023: I enjoyed presenting some early-stage research on The Varieties of Printed Material in Europe between 1450 and 1650: A Title Embeddings Approach in the PhD Group here at Mason. It is joint work with Alexander Taylor who is on the market this year.

9-28-2023: I enjoyed attending the Economic History Association Meetings in Pittsburgh. My PhD Student, Alexander Taylor, presented our work on The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press. Here are presentation slides to go with the paper.

4-28-2023: I'm looking forward to attending the conference on "Deep-Rooted Factors in Comparative Development" at Brown on May 6 and 7.

4-15-2023: We have a new draft of our paper on The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press. Here are presentation slides to go with the paper.

1-25-2023: I'm running our weekly speaker series, the Public Choice Seminar, this semester. We have a great schedule of speakers planned.

1-25-2023: My classes are all set to go for this semester. I'm teaching a section of Undergraduate Economic History as well as a Ph.D. Seminar in Text as Data and Machine Learning. Really looking forward to the semester.

2-30-2023: We have a new draft of our paper on Pandemics and Cities: Evidence from the Black Death and the Long-Run. Here is the appendix. Here are some presentation slides to go with the paper.

1-25-2023: I enjoyed attending a Liberty Fund event last week on "The New Histories of Capitalism and American Slavery" in Perdido Bay, Alabama. Lot's of interesting readings and participants.

12-7-2022: I had a really great time presenting our research on the The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press to the history group at the London School of Economics.

12-7-2022: It was a real honor to sit on the Viva Committee for Safya Morshed at the London School of Economics last week. She'd doing great work on the Mughal Empire.

10-22-2022: I had a really great time presenting our research on the The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press at the University of Pittsburgh.

5-11-2022: The Board of Vistors has approved my promotion to Full Professor!

5-11-2022: I'm happy to be attending the Washington Political Economy Conference at Georgetown on 5/12 and 5/13. The program looks fantastic.

5-11-2022: I'm looking forward to traveling Northwestern from 5/19 to 5/21 to participate in a book conference on Walker Hanlon's new book "The Rise and Fall of Laissez Faire". I'm really enjoying reading it.

4-27-2022: Excited to present our new paper on The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press at Texas Tech for the Free Market Institute on Friday.

4-27-2022: Had a really great time presenting our research on The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press for the Center for Micro-Economic Policy Research on Tuesday.

4-27-2022: I really enjoyed giving a virtual talk (and meeting lots of interesting faculty) at the University of Connecticut on 4-12. I presented our research on The Impact of the Black Death on the Adoption of the Printing Press.

4-8-2022: I had a great time chatting with Jeffrey Lin for his podcast Densely Speaking. We talked about my recent paper with Remi Jedwab and Mark Koyama on Medieval Cities Through the Lend of Urban Economics that we published in Regional Science and Urban Economics. The podcast is here. My bit starts at 20:44.