Can well-defined access rights to publicly owned land achieve the same efficient outcome as is expected with private property rights? In this paper, I evaluate the impact of public property rights using the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, which determined secure access rights for ranchers to newly created, large grazing districts in the Western US. Using satellite-based vegetation data, I exploit spatial discontinuities across grazing district boundaries and find that public lands with well-defined access rights for ranchers are at least 10% more productive than lands without. Immediately after establishing grazing districts, ranchers inside these districts held more cattle, reported higher income and farm values than their counterparts outside. I argue that secure access rights resolve uncertainty around future usage and align the incentives of ranchers and regulators, thus incentivizing sustainable and profitable usage. I provide three results supporting this hypothesis. First, in line with Coase (1960), I provide evidence that areas with stronger pre-reform state capacity show larger increases in vegetation. Second, monthly patterns on vegetation are consistent with the adoption of productivity-increasing fallowing practices. Third, using plots sold just before the passing of the Act, I show that secure access rights to publicly-owned land can be as effective as the benchmark of privatization. I investigate alternative explanations, and find no empirical support for differential initial productivity; negative spillovers; or systematic local manipulation of boundaries.

How does state repression change political beliefs and behavior? We address this question using evidence from the genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Exploring local variation in state coercion during the genocide, we find that repression leads to more votes in favor of the opposition over the authoritarian incumbent, stiffer electoral competition, and increased support for democratic values four decades later. At the same time, people become more cautious in their interactions with the local community as captured by less trust in others and lower participation in community organizations. The results are consistent with a theoretical model in which the experience of repression increases people's preferences for pluralism but also raises the perceived cost of dissent. These opposing forces imply that citizens are more likely to support the opposition in elections (voice), while they engage less in civil society (exit) to avoid publicly revealing their political views. In line with the prediction that increased political competition reduces elected officials' ability to extract rent, we show that the changes in political beliefs and behavior also affect policy outcomes. Together, our results indicate that the legacy of state violence can have a persistent effect on society, leading to a more competitive but less personal political environment.

International migration has a considerable impact on trade between nations. While supported by evidence from developed countries, the effects of migration on trade are less clear cut for developing countries. Given the evidence on ethnic identity in Africa, standard estimates based on the nationality of migrants are likely biased in developing countries. In this paper, I expand the standard approach to explicitly account for heterogeneous ethnicities migrating between countries. Using the precolonial distribution of ethnicities as an instrument for modern day migration in Africa, I estimate a considerably larger effect on bilateral exports and economic development than previously found. I provide evidence that ethnic identification shapes bilateral trade by facilitating the flow of information, especially for ethnicities who are not part of a government coalition. I discuss potential concerns of precolonial ethnic linkages and find no evidence of omitted variable biases caused by similar languages, preferences, or conflict. The results are consistent with a model of international trade where cross border connections decrease the fixed costs of exporting by shared information.

With the advent of the women’s rights movement many gender gaps have started to narrow in Western societies. While this improvement has attracted much scholarly work, empirical evidence on the factors that allowed the women’s rights movement to emerge in the first place remains scarce. We compile detailed biographical data on the universe of notable women in German history and document that the staggered introduction of secondary education – in the form of religious finishing schools – from the 17th century onwards led to an increase in women’s representation among the human capital elite. By easing access to critical ideas and reducing the cost of accessing networks of like-minded women, these finishing schools promoted the emergence of a female human capital elite that formed the nucleus of the German women’s rights movement. Through further dissemination of critical ideas and the institutionalization of their networks, the women’s rights movement ultimately succeeded in obtaining equal access to education, the right to work, and suffrage. Taken together, our results suggest that by facilitating the formation of a female human capital elite, finishing schools – i.e. secondary education for women – played a pivotal role in the emergence of the women’s rights movement and thus for women’s empowerment at large.

Free primary education is considered an important public policy to promote poor children's schooling. We explore a nationwide policy experiment in Cambodia in 2000 that abolished primary school fees to assess this claim. The paper investigates the effects of the program by combining differences in fee exposure across province, time, and cohort. One additional year of free education had no impact on children living in households below the consumption poverty line, but increased the likelihood of completing primary school, led to more years of schooling completed, and raised literacy for children in households above the poverty line. To ensure a causal interpretation of the heterogeneous effects, we exploit weather-induced agricultural volatility to estimate the difference across the consumption poverty line. Though poor and non-poor children attended school to same extent after the reform, poor children were less likely to progress and complete the higher grades. The findings are consistent with the idea that poor children and their parents are affected by the local community's educational norm, where income segregation may explain why poor students fail to take advantage of the policy change.

I study the effect of a large wealth transfer to the rural population on their political preferences. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 placed 142 million acres under public ownership and documented the rights to access these lands for nearby farmers. These property rights on public land increased the wealth almost immediately since they were an accepted collateral and influenced the pricing of a farm. I focus on close elections and show that counties affected by this policy were initially more likely to elect a democratic congressman at a magnitude similar to the incumbency advantage. This preference for redistributive policy is completely eroded almost immediately after the policy took place. Focusing on congressional elections during the great depression, I show that the most likely explanation is a change in preferences away from redistribution.