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.
- Applied econometrics with an emphasis on spatial and text-as-data methods.
What’s New?
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.
6-19-2026: Alexander Taylor and I have a new working paper. It is called "Mapping the Market for Ideas in Europe, 1450–1650: A Title-Embeddings Approach". We use title-level embeddings of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. We find that early modern cities with greater access to the market for print produced more topically diverse books. We also find that the "useful knowledge" share of that output predicts later city growth. Here are the presentation slides.
6-10-2026: I presented our paper "Mapping the Market for Ideas in Europe, 1450–1650" to the Mercatus AI Working Group.
5-18-2026: I am teaching Econ 360 Development Economics online this summer. It is an asynchronous course. Here is the syllabus.
7-24-2025: I'll be at the World Economic History Congress next week to present new work with Malik Hussain on "The Great Revolt and its Legacy: Understanding Vaccine Hesitancy in Colonial India". Here is a draft of the paper. Here are the presentation slides. My session is on Monday July 28 at 2pm in the Hornsbergsalen room at Kulturen. The other papers in my session also look great.