Job Market Papers

1. The State and the Origins of Inequality: Evidence from Nagaland  

This paper traces the origins of inequality to state expansion. Nagaland, a tribal region in India’s northeast, was incorporated into formal state structures in a staggered manner—first under British rule and later by the Indian state. Using variation in years since annexation, I show that longer state exposure improves average outcomes, including schooling, wealth, child survival rates, and non-agricultural employment. However, accompanying these changes are increases in within-village wealth inequality, suggesting emerging hierarchies among individuals in the same compact community. The results are robust to an instrumental-variables strategy based on proximity to pre-annexation British tea estates, which influenced annexation timing through colonial security concerns. Exploring mechanisms, I find that in areas with longer state exposure, political elites hold substantially more assets relative to their constituents’ mean incomes. These areas also exhibit an expansion of public-sector employment consistent with patronage-based job creation, likely reflecting reciprocal exchange between newly-emerging political authorities and non-elites. 

2. Forced Modernization and its Discontents: Policy and Culture in Laos 

This paper evaluates a centrally-planned resettlement policy in rural Laos intended to modernize livelihoods and reduce poverty among ethnic groups traditionally practicing swidden (slash-and-burn) upland rice agriculture, where households cultivate dry-rice fields on forested slopes using rotational fallowing. By regrouping houses away from mountain slopes and into nearby valleys, the policy aimed to steer these societies toward permanent wet-rice paddies, considered technologically more advanced. Using the staggered timing of treatment, I find that the policy reduced village swidden plots by 30–40% five to ten years post-resettlement. However, ethnographic studies reveal that swidden practices are deeply interwoven with kinship ties and ethnic identities, and resistance to new methods reflects more than just unsuitable terrain. Using a triple-difference strategy—comparing traditional swidden-rice and wet-rice societies across regions with varying treatment intensity before and after resettlement—I find evidence of decreased well-being among those impacted: lower schooling attainment, increased child mortality, worse child health outcomes, and reduced household wealth. Exploring mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that the policy only marginally shifted households into wet-rice cultivation; instead, these farmers reduced fallow duration as a possible coping response to limited swidden land in the new environment.

Presentations: JSDE, UW Seattle (2025); ASREC (2026)

Working Papers

The Price of Alliance: The Hmong and the CIA's Secret War in Laos 

What social and institutional legacies do proxy wars leave for the groups that fought as proxies? In 1962, the Geneva Agreement declared Laos neutral, barring any foreign military presence. To circumvent this amid the perceived threat of advancing communism in Southeast Asia, the CIA covertly armed the Hmong—an ethnic group living in the highland areas that the U.S Intelligence considered militarily strategic—to fight on its behalf. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I find that this alliance came at great cost to the Hmong, as evidenced by sharp falls in education that lasted a generation. Furthermore, after the war’s end in 1975, the victorious communist government unleashed a series of retaliatory policies. Ethnolinguistic maps before and after the war reveal sharp territorial diminutions for the Hmong, while aggregate data indicate an accompanying steep decline in their political power. These losses appear to result from sustained postwar displacement, due both to initial flight as well as state-led resettlement programs, relocating Hmong villages to more legible regions. Lastly, recent survey data suggests that Hmong refugees in the U.S. who were directly exposed to the war are significantly more assertive of both their ethnic and American identities, pointing to a possible mechanism through which state suspicion may persist over time.

Presentations: NEUDC, Tufts U (2025)

Federally-Funded Science as Engines of Regional Innovation and Prosperity with Susan Helper and Daniel Shoag 

Can federal science funding spur local innovation and prosperity? After WWII, the U.S. built 16 national labs, mostly outside existing innovation hubs. Compared to runners-up and synthetic controls, we show lab locations experienced lasting boosts in patenting by nearby, unrelated inventors. Spillovers appear in citation patterns and research area shifts. Newly digitized county-level data from 1937–1971 reveal large, heterogeneous economic gains. Matched census records show benefits accrued to both existing and new residents. These findings suggest science funding can shape innovation ecosystems and support broad-based local development.  

Presentations: NBER Placed-Based Policies and Entrepreneurship, Fall 2024; NBER Summer Institute Innovation, Summer 2025.

Cultural Foundations of Geographic Settlement: Evidence from Southeast Asian Migration (Revise and Resubmit, Explorations in Economic History) 

Studies often trace the roots of various institutions to traditional livelihood practices, which in turn are shaped by the geography or ecology societies inhabit. This paper provides historical evidence in the opposite direction, that pre-existing agricultural practices may sometimes dictate the geography groups migrate to over time. In doing so, however, they also carry with them a bundle of institutions to these new locations. Thus an alternate way to interpret geography's role in historical institutional development is that rather than it being the root cause of endogenous, independent institutional formation, it might instead have an attractive force for pre-existing institutions developed elsewhere but with similar environmental features.  

Consequences of Forced Agglomeration via Village Groupings in Mizoram (India) 

This paper examines the impact of a forced agglomeration program in Mizoram, India, in response to a guerrilla uprising. Over 500 villages were relocated into one of 105 existing villages called “Grouping Centers” (GCs), while about 120 remained ungrouped. Using a difference-in-differences approach, this study finds lasting population divergence 20-30 years later and a reduction in agricultural employment in GCs, alongside increased labor-force participation and higher likelihood of having official urban status, suggesting long-term structural change.

Work in Progress

The Economic Consequences of a Peace Settlement: Evidence from Northeast India (writing in progress) 

In 1997/1998, the Government of India signed a ceasefire agreement with an armed group representing an ethnic minority in the state of Manipur. The clauses provided for a mutual cessation of hostilities, with the government suspending counter-insurgency operations and the rebels agreeing not to target security forces. Using a triple-difference strategy—comparing villages belonging to the treated group with other ethnic minority villages, across regions with varying density of military battalion stations, before and after the agreement—I find that economic activity, proxied by night lights, increases in treated villages that are in more military-dense areas. This paper therefore contributes to our understanding of peace settlements and their consequences for economic growth. 

Heterogenous Responses to Market Forces in Vietnam

Chiefs, Customs, and Colonies