I'm a Professor in the Economics Department at George Mason University.
My research interests include:
- The historical origins of modern liberal institutions and religious freedom. 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".
- State capacity and long-run economic development.
- How historical shocks—epidemics, violence, and the spread of technology—leave lasting legacies for trust, institutions, and growth. There are interactive companions to my papers on the Black Death and the printing press, how information markets respond to a crisis, the Great Revolt, the market for ideas, and craft guilds.
- Applied econometrics with an emphasis on spatial and text-as-data methods.
Interactive Companions
Each companion walks through one working paper with figures you can move.
Craft guilds and city growth
How Do Information Markets Respond to a Crisis?
Mapping the market for ideas
The Great Revolt and vaccine hesitancy
The Black Death and the printing press
See all interactive companions →
What’s New?
10-17-2026: I have built interactive companions to five of my working papers. Each one walks through a paper with figures you can move and data you can explore. They cover craft guilds and city growth, how information markets respond to a crisis, the market for ideas in early modern Europe, the Great Revolt and vaccine hesitancy in colonial India, and the Black Death and the printing press.
9-16-2026: I joined the Silk Road Revival podcast for a wide ranging conversation. You can watch it here. We talked about how I came to economic history in the first place. We also discussed my work with Malik Hussain on "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India" and my work with Alexander Taylor on "Mapping the Market for Ideas in Europe, 1450–1650".
9-15-2026: I have collected my short data essays in one place. Each one runs the data behind a working paper to answer a question the paper itself does not take up. You can expand any of them to read the whole thread.
8-23-2026: I am teaching two courses this Fall. Econ 623 American Economic History and Econ 895 Spatial Techniques in Empirical Economics. Here are the syllabi for American Economic History and Spatial Techniques. I have rewritten the spatial course to teach large language models and AI alongside the methods.
7-5-2026: Malik Hussain and I have a new draft of our paper "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India". We ask whether exposure to colonial violence shaped later engagement with public health in India. We study smallpox vaccination from 1870 to 1919 and the legacy of the 1857 revolt. Districts closer to Lucknow where British retribution was most extensive show lower vaccination uptake in the decades that followed. The decline is strongest right after the revolt and fades across cohorts.
7-2-2026: I posted a thread on X and Bluesky about a fun experiment with my early modern book title data. The most famous party trick in AI takes word vectors and computes king minus man plus woman. You often get queen. I wondered whether the same trick would work using nothing but the titles of books printed in Europe between 1450 and 1650. So I trained word embeddings on about 800,000 early modern book titles across seven languages and ran the analogy in each one. In Latin it is textbook perfect. Rex minus uir plus femina returns regina as the single closest word. Queen also lands near the top in English and French. Where the trick fails is just as revealing. The Spanish corpus is wall to wall royal proclamations so king basically means a specific man named Philip. The market for ideas had structure and the vectors can see it.
6-25-2026: I posted a thread on X and Bluesky about some early findings from my ongoing work with Alex Taylor using the Universal Short Title Catalogue. We used edition counts to trace how the Thirty Years' War reshaped the geography of European print. Imperial forces sacked Magdeburg in 1631 and its presses fell nearly silent. Neutral Hamburg boomed at the same time. The two cities traded places. We then looked at serious scholarly Latin in fields like theology and medicine. The German lands had tracked the rest of Europe for decades. Then the war cut their output roughly in half even as the rest of Europe kept growing. The center of learned print shifted west toward the Dutch Republic and France. These results are preliminary but the timing and the geography are striking.
