Nation-Building Through Military Service (with Juan Pedro Ronconi)
Conditionally accepted at the Journal of the European Economic Association
This paper studies conscription’s role in durably shaping attitudes and beliefs consistent with nation-building. We pair original survey data covering 29 cohorts of conscripts in Argentina with random variation in service emerging from a lottery. We find that serving in the military leads to a stronger national identity and social integration several decades after serving but does not affect civic behaviors such as voting or paying taxes. Value inculcation during service helps explain the baseline patterns, while exposure to and interaction with diverse peers reinforce but do not drive the results. (Access Paper Here | Pre-analysis Plan | Pre-analysis Plan Second Round )
Legacies of Liberation: Political Dynamics in Civil War Refugee Camps
Resubmitted to the Journal of Economic Growth
This paper documents the evolution of political outcomes in Civil War refugee camps, where roughly 600,000 enslaved African Americans achieved freedom. Refugee camps became sites of African American empowerment after the war, but these accomplishments were followed by a backlash that overturned the progressive outlook by the early 1900s. Despite the backlash, African Americans enjoyed persistently higher rates of literacy in counties home to refugee camps, fostering a sustained, selected outmigration of whites and enabling improved interracial relations. Today, progressive politics enjoy an advantage at these sites of former emancipation, and whites are key contributors to this progressive outlook. Overall, while progressive achievements may provoke backlash, they can also set in motion the very conditions that eventually erode resistance and foster renewed political progress. (Access Paper Here)
Historical Narratives and Political Behavior in the US (with Elsa Voytas)
We examine how people think and speak about the history of race in the United States. Based on 14,044 surveys, we document substantial ideological divides in views about the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and slavery's legacy, with pronounced differences among whites. The structure of historical narratives also varies by ideology: Conservatives, particularly white conservatives, emphasize individual agency and detach the past from the present, while liberals tend to portray the present as the continuation of the past. Evidence from two survey-embedded interventions suggests that historical narratives about race can deepen polarization in institutional satisfaction. (Access paper here)
Gauging Preference for Democracy in Absence of Free Speech (with Josie I Chen and Louis Putterman)
Revision requested at the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics
Whether people prefer a democratic system is difficult to judge when speaking freely carries personal dangers. We introduce an incentivized experimental task to reveal implicit preference for democracy without referencing politically-sensitive terms. We validate the task with data from émigrés from Greater China living in North America, demonstrating our experimental tool’s ability to gauge favorability toward democracy when participants come from backgrounds where eliciting such views is challenging. We corroborate the task’s accuracy and its ability to uncover patterns in democratic sentiment with data from a representative US sample and from a diverse set of participants in China. (Access Paper Here)
Supplementary Files: Instructions and Questionnaires
Social Exclusion and Social Preferences: Evidence from Colombia's Leper Colony, American Economic Review 2023, 113 (5): 1294-1333.
This paper explores the intergenerational legacy of social exclusion on pro-sociality. A lab-in-the-field approach in the historical region of Colombia’s leper colony reveals that descendants of socially excluded individuals are locally altruistic and extend such altruism to outsiders who have undergone similar circumstances. These individuals also display mistrust toward those who have, historically, been exclusionary—in this case, doctors. The content of historical narratives shared by ancestors who were excluded, which emphasize the endured mistreatment and doctors’ historical misinformation, is one mechanism that partially explains the intergenerational patterns. (Access paper here)
Media: Psychology Today | Nada es Gratis (In Spanish) | Winner of the Nada es Gratis Job Market Paper Prize | El Espectador (In Spanish)
Historical Conflict and Gender Disparities (Access latest draft here)
Interpersonal Diversity and Carbon Emissions (Access latest draft here)