This dissertation studies economic development in rural areas, past and present. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that around 80% of people experiencing extreme poverty live in rural areas. Understanding the rural policies that have worked historically to foster economic growth—and the political factors that shape these policies in the present---will be crucial to ending extreme poverty in today's world.
The first chapter, written jointly with Joel Ferguson, focuses on the rise of China—which, according to the World Bank, has been responsible for 75% of global extreme poverty reduction and 23% of global GDP growth since 1980. We study one of the central reforms in China's economic miracle, the Household Responsibility System (HRS), which decollectivized agriculture starting in 1978. The HRS is commonly seen as having significantly boosted agricultural productivity—but this conclusion rests on unreliable official data. We use historical satellite imagery to generate new measurements of grain yield, independent of official Chinese statistics. Using two separate empirical designs that exploit the staggered rollout of the HRS across provinces and counties, we find no causal evidence that areas that adopted the HRS sooner experienced faster grain yield growth. These results challenge our conventional understanding of decollectivization, land reform, and the origins of the Chinese miracle.
The second chapter, co-authored with Jen Kuan Wang, turns to Taiwan to understand its landmark 1950s land reform, which has long been seen as a central contributor to its economic miracle. By digitizing archival data and using two instrumental variables strategies, we provide the first causal evidence about this major event in East Asian economic history. Phase II of reform redistributed formerly Japanese public lands, reducing tenancy, boosting rice yields, and pulling labor from manufacturing back to agriculture. By contrast, phase III, which reduced tenancy by breaking up larger estates, did not increase agricultural productivity and pushed labor out of agriculture. Phase II likely increased yields by lifting crop choice constraints, while phase III may have created farms too small to be economically viable. These differential results complicate traditional favorable narratives of Taiwan's reform.
The third chapter moves to modern-day Kenya. Co-authored with Susanna Berkouwer, Eric Hsu, Edward Miguel, Felipe Vial, and Catherine Wolfram, it explores the role of political favoritism in shaping Kenya's nationwide electrification program. A consensus among social scientists finds that political favoritism can harm economic growth by distorting public investment, but favoritism is typically hard to identify because researchers cannot directly observe government objectives. Using granular infrastructure and electoral data, this paper leverages a key institutional feature of Kenya's nationwide electrification program to identify the extent of favoritism: a pre-existing transparent allocation formula. Despite constitutional reforms decentralizing fiscal expenditures, we find that pro-government areas received 46% more electrified villages and 35% more household connections than allocated by the formula. Furthermore, we find that favoritism was exerted by national offices—not Members of Parliament or local construction managers. These results suggest that the benefits of central coordination, technical capacity, and economies of scale may expose infrastructure to continued political capture despite decentralization.
