The efficacy of foreign aid, especially when given to satisfy the objectives of the donor country, is highly controversial. I study this question in the context of Chinese infrastructure aid, which has received much attention from policymakers. I build a novel project- and firm-level dataset to identify political determinants of Chinese aid and its economic consequences for recipient countries. I document that when there is local labor unrest in a Chinese prefecture, contracts for Chinese aid projects are allocated to large state-owned firms in the prefecture, and employment by these firms increases. Connections between these firms and other countries mean that China’s response to domestic unrest affects the allocation of Chinese aid projects to recipient countries. I exploit the variation in the countries' receipt of aid caused by the timing and spatial variation in local labor unrest in China, together with these connections, to develop an instrument for identifying the causal effects of Chinese aid on recipients. I find large positive effects on GDP, consumption and employment.

Wealthy foreign real estate buyers have increased rapidly over the past few decades. Of particular note are those from China; in 2016 alone, Chinese buyers were the source of over 100 billion USD of outflows to real estate markets worldwide. In this paper, we investigate the effect that these wealthy Chinese buyers have on local U.S. housing markets, local governments and residents. Using a novel instrument, we demonstrate that an increase in the share of wealthy Chinese buyers in a locality causes an increase in house price growth. As a result of this increased growth, local governments benefit from increased property tax revenues but do not see a drop in sales tax revenues, suggesting that the vacancy rate for Chinese-owned properties is no different from that of counterfactual buyers. A drop in rental prices suggests that wealthy Chinese buyers are more likely to rent out their houses and less likely to move into them.

This paper examines the state-building process in an important context: the founding of new, multi-ethnic states in post-colonial Africa. We study the Ujamaa reforms in Tanzania in 1970–1981, one of the largest nation-building policy experiments in recent history. The reforms dramatically altered the nature of public education by changing the content of the curriculum and expanding access to schooling. To implement the reforms, the Tanzanian government used a concurrent policy, known as villagization, which forced much of the country’s population to live together in government administrated villages. We combine differences in the intensity of villagization across districts with differences across school cohorts, induced by the timing of the policy, to identify the effect of Ujamaa on citizens' attitudes. We show persistent, positive effects on citizens' identification with the nation, as measured both by survey responses and ethnic intermarriage. Treated cohorts are also more likely to express positive views for a strong central state and less likely to question state authority.

This paper provides evidence of the long-run effects of a permanent increase in agricultural productivity on conflict. We construct a newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles in Europe, the Near East, and North Africa from 1400–1900 CE and examine variation in agricultural productivity due to the introduction of potatoes from the Americas to the Old World after the Columbian Exchange. We find that the introduction of potatoes led to a sizeable and permanent reduction in conflict.

We exploit the staggered introduction of 3G mobile internet in Africa to examine the effect of new communication technologies on the spread of political unrest in and across countries. We design a novel empirical strategy that allows us to separate the direct effect of mobile internet on unrest from spillovers. We find that digital communication networks lead to the spread of unrest independent of physical distance. Preliminary evidence suggests that social media constitute an important channel.

We use detailed administrative firm data and natural language processing techniques to understand the scope of and motivations underlying the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) growing involvement in the operations of private firms in China.

We examine variation in agricultural productivity due to the introduction of potatoes from the Americas to the Old World after the Columbian Exchange to empirically test Alesina and Spolaore’s (2005) theory of heterogeneity and state size.