Christopher Paik

• New York University

How do external threats to state sovereignty benefit local development? In this paper, we look at Thailand’s railroad projects in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as an example of a state’s strategic response to colonial encroachment. By transporting government officials and establishing a permanent administrative presence, the rai...

In this paper we investigate how historical persecution and displacement enable religious organizations to become politically influential. Major churches in South Korea are founded by pastors from what is today North Korea, who were persecuted by the communist regime and defected to the south before the Korean War. We show that Protestants in South...

The Silk Roads stretched across Eurasia, connecting East and West for centuries. At its height, the network of trade routes enabled merchants to travel from China to the Mediterranean Sea, carrying with them high‐value commercial goods, the exchange of which encouraged urban growth and prosperity. We examine the extent to which urban centers thrive...

How persistent is the family lineage effect in a meritocracy? While meritocratic institutions aim to screen political elites based on individual merit, they may still allow the elites to perpetuate their influence through the descendants. In this paper we look at the ancestors’ role in determining the political careers of individuals during the Jos...

In this article we document a reversal of fortune within the Western agricultural core, showing that regions which made early transition to Neolithic agriculture are now poorer than regions that made the transition later. The finding contrasts recent influential works emphasizing the beneficial role of early transition. Using data from a large numb...

Scholars have long sought to understand when and why the Middle East fell behind Europe in its economic development. This article explores the importance of historical Muslim trade in explaining urban growth and decline in the run-up to the Industrial Revolution. The authors examine Eurasian urbanization patterns as a function of distance to Middle...

In this paper, we show that state stability exhibits a persistent and robust non-monotonic relationship with economic development. Based on observations in Europe spanning from 1 to 2000 AD, regions that have historically experienced either short- or long-duration state rule on average lag behind in their local wealth today, while those that have e...

This article investigates the role of colonial pressure on state centralization and its relationship to subsequent development by analyzing the influence of Western colonial threats on Siam's internal political reform. Unlike other countries in the region, Siam remained independent by adopting geographical administrative boundaries and incorporatin...

Cassava was introduced to Africa from Latin America after the Colombian exchange. Relative to other crops, it grows well under the marginal conditions including drought season and produces more energy per unit area with limited human inputs. However, in spite of the traits as a food security crop, it has a number of major liabilities including toxi...

In this paper we examine the impact of pre-colonial educated elites and colonization on modernization. Using the case of Joseon, as Korea was known before being colonized by Japan in 1910, we investigate how civil exam system and scholarly traditions in Joseon, as well as the provision of public schools under Japanese colonial rule, influenced leve...

In this paper we explore a unique causal channel through which knowledge spread in pre-modern Korea: the exile system (yubae-jaedo) during the Joseon period (1392-1897 CE). We find that districts which hosted a higher number of exiled outcasts from the capital also witnessed a higher number of scholars who subsequently passed the official court exa...

On the eve of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the nearly 300 semi-autonomous domains across Japan had widely varying tax rates. Some handed over 70 percent of their rice yield to the samurai ruler of the domain, while others provided 15 percent. This variation existed in spite of the similar fiscal demands that the domain rulers faced within the Tok...

This paper pursues an inquiry into the relationship between ethnicity and development in the largest authoritarian country in the contemporary world, the People’s Republic of China. It engages the theoretical literature on ethnic diversity and development in general, but also pays special attention to political economy logics unique to authoritaria...

This paper investigates the long-run influence of the Neolithic Revolution on contemporary cultural norms as reflected in the dimension of collectivism–individualism. We present a theory of agricultural origins of cultural divergence, where we claim that the advent of farming in a core region was characterized by collectivist values and eventually...

Holy Land Crusades were among the most significant forms of military mobilization to occur during the medieval period. Crusader mobilization had important implications for European state formation. We find that areas with large numbers of Holy Land crusaders witnessed increased political stability and institutional development as well as greater ur...

Korean families belong to clan lineages, bon-guan, that originated in the imperial Joseon period, 1392–1897. We can rank bon-guan by their average Joseon status, measured by the recorded number of civil service exam passers. In the disruptions of the Japanese occupation and the Korean War it is believed many families switched their bon-guan to more...

What is the relationship between economic grievance and ethnopolitical conflict? Many theories on ethnic conflict posit a relationship between economic inequality and conflict, and many tend to agree that economic inequality between groups is one of the main causes of grievance and thereby political mobilization. This article engages existing liter...

In a novel approach to studying political mobilization among ethnic Tibetans in China, this article addresses two key questions. First, considering the Chinese state's repressive policies towards Tibetan Buddhism, what role does religion play in fomenting Tibetan political resistance? Second, what implications can be drawn from the changing ethnic...

While it is widely believed that regions which experienced a transition to Neolithic agriculture early also become institutionally and economically more advanced, many indicators suggest that within the Western agricultural core (including Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia), communities that adopted agriculture early in fact...

This study investigates how messages, creative strategies and advertising disclosures utilized by US retirement financial services (RFS) providers changed in response to the recent economic crisis. A content analysis examines a total of 1819 RFS print advertisements published in six national magazines during the period 2005–2009. Three significant...

This paper investigates the historical inuence of ethnic integration on current political outcomes. It draws evidence from various regions in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and the surrounding counties in Tibet Autonomous Prefectures which recently witnessed waves of protests in 2008. Using a novel town name index database that identi…es the eth...

The nighttime streetlight imagery has been used as a viable measure of economic activ-ities and level of infrastructure. The satellite snapshots of brightly lit areas are especially useful for analyzing patterns of public goods provision in states where it is di¢ cult to ob-tain unbiased socioeconomic data. Interpreting these images as representati...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of violence and oppression by terrorist groups on local populations. We test whether locals with ethnic ties to the terrorists are more likely suffer from violence as the terrorists attempt to create distance between group members and the culture they can easily defect to. This would mean actions leading t...

This paper seeks to explain how connections influence the formation of group structures, and what happen to these structures as individual preferences change. It offers an alternative approach to the study of institutional development by employing social network models. The findings show that efficient structures, which maximize the overall wealth...

This paper uses data from the World Values Survey(WVS) and carbon dates of initial agricultural adoption covering Europe and the Near East to show a possible link between current cultural behaviors of people and prehistorical events, namely the Neolithic Rev- olution. Taking the initial agricultural adoption date as a proxy for the initial cultural...

This paper provides evidence that the Neolithic Revolution has aected modern institu- tions by in‡uencing the spread of early institutions. Using novel vegetation data and carbon dates that show the initial agricultural adoption from various Neolithic archaeological sites, as well as executive constraint and local tax level data in Europe and East...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.