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?
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.
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.