Taylor Jaworski

Associate Professor of Economics, CU Boulder
Research Associate, NBER

I am an economic historian at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I also serve as interim director of the Benson Center. My research focuses on the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interest in the process of adapting to changes in the structure of economic activity, the impact of large-scale interventions through the wartime mobilization or building infrastructure, and the role of government.

CV | Google Scholar | NBER | LinkedIn

Working Papers

• "How Important Are Cultural Frictions for Internal Migration? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century United States," with Erik Kimbrough and Nicole Saito. [link]
• "The Emergence of Regional Cultures in the United States," with Erik Kimbrough. [link, LLM-Friendly]
• "The Urban Wage Premium in Historical Perspective," with Kyle Butts and Carl Kitchens. [link]
• "Subsidizing Entry in Retail Electricity: Evidence from the Rural Electrification Administration," with Carl Kitchens and Andrew Smyth.
• "Skill Formation, Child Labor, and the Schooling Consequences of the World War I Agricultural Boom," with Carl Kitchens and Luke Rodgers. [link, LLM-Friendly]

Publications

• "Economic Geography and Air Pollution Regulation in the United States," with Alex Hollingsworth, Carl Kitchens, and Ivan Rudik, Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics, 2026. [link]
• "Did War Mobilization Cause Aggregate and Regional Growth?" with Dongkyu Yang, Explorations in Economic History, 2025. [link]
• "Spatial Poverty Dynamics and Social Mobility in Rural America," with Dylan Connor, Johannes Uhl, Siqiao Xie, Catherine Talbot, Cyrus Hester, Myron Gutmann, Stefan Leyk, and Lori Hunter, Population, Space and Place, 2024. [link]
• "Highways and Globalization," with Carl Kitchens and Sergey Nigai, International Economic Review, 2023. [link, VoxEU]
• "Globalization and the Spread of Industrialization in Canada, 1871-1891," with Ian Keay, Explorations in Economic History, 2022. [link]
• "Spillover Effects of IP Protection in the Interwar Aircraft Industry," with Walker Hanlon, Economic Journal, 2022. [link, VoxEU]
• "Specification and Structure in Economic History," Explorations in Economic History, 2020. [link]
• "National Policy for Regional Development: Historical Evidence from Appalachian Highways," with Carl Kitchens, Review of Economics & Statistics, 2019. [link, note]
• "Two World Wars in American Economic History," with Price V. Fishback, Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, 2018. [link]
• "Shakeout in the Early Airframe Industry," with Andrew Smyth, Economic History Review, 2018. [link]
• "Revisiting the Great Compression," with Greg Niemesh, Historical Methods, 2018. [link]
• "Entry and Pricing on Broadway," with Maggie Jones and Mario Samano, Applied Economics Letters, 2018. [link]
• "World War II and the Industrialization of the American South," Journal of Economic History, 2017. [link, VoxEU, data]
• "Ownership and the Price of Residential Electricity: Evidence from the United States, 1935-1940," with Carl Kitchens, Explorations in Economic History, 2017. [link]
• "Bubbles, Crashes and Endogenous Uncertainty in Linked Asset and Product Markets," with Erik O. Kimbrough, International Economic Review, 2016. [link]
• "'You're in the Army Now': The Impact of World War II on Women's Education, Work, and Family," Journal of Economic History, 2014. [link, data]
• "Go West Young Man: Self-Selection and Endogenous Property Rights," with Bart J. Wilson, Southern Economic Journal, 2013. [link]
• "The Ecological and Civil Mainsprings of Property: An Experimental Economic History of Whalers' Rules of Capture," with Bart J. Wilson, Karl Schurter, and Andrew Smyth, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2012. [link]

Teaching

• US Economic History
• European Economic History