About Me

I am an economic historian at the University of Colorado, Boulder. My research focuses on regional development, regulation, and infrastructure in the United States. My curriculum vitae is available here.

Publications

  • "Economic Geography and Air Pollution Regulation in the United States," with Alex Hollingsworth, Carl Kitchens, and Ivan Rudik. Forthcoming at Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics. [link]

  • "Did War Mobilization Cause Aggregate and Regional Growth?" with Dongkyu Yang. Forthcoming at Explorations in Economic History.

  • "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 column]

  • "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 column]

  • "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 column, 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]

Work in Progress

  • "How Important Are Cultural Frictions for Internal Migration? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century United States," with Erik Kimbrough and Nicole Saito. [link]

  • "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.

  • "Human Capital Investment in Resource Booms: Evidence for Dynamic Complementarities," with Carl Kitchens and Luke Rodgers.

Teaching

  • I teach undergraduate courses on the economic history of the United States and Europe. For the United States, the focus is on the interaction between economic growth and changes in inequality; for Europe, the emphasis is on the emergence of the modern economy in the context of institutional and technological change.

    I plan to teach a new undergraduate course on Markets and Morality. Students are exposed to game theory, experimental economics, the history of economic ideas, economic history, and moral philosophy to better understand when to think positively and how to think normatively about economic issues.

    I also teach a graduate course on US economic history. This course provides an introduction to the key debates in US economic history and prepares PhD students to conduct original research.