Working Papers

• Fairness and Cooperation: Draft Dodging by the Rich and War Morale in World War II

Work in Progress

• Better Beings: Education, Progressive Reform and Eugenics in the United States (with Elliott Ash, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Noam Yuchtman)

  Preview

  Throughout the 20th century, 32 US states passed eugenic sterilization laws, leading to 70,000 forced sterilizations. These policies were enacted as a means of controlling populations deemed “undesirable”—including immigrants, people of color, the poor, and individuals with physical or mental disabilities. We collect and analyze roll call votes on these laws to examine the determinants of their support.

• Red Tails, Broken Wings: Talent Misallocation Among America’s Most Talented African-Americans (with Elisabeth Perlman, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Jennifer Withrow)

  Preview

  In 1942, for the first time in its history, the US military opened aviation roles to Black Americans. This initiative led to the selection of 992 highly skilled individuals, who would become known as the Tuskegee Airmen. However, their service did not shield them from discrimination, which persisted both during and after WWII. The formidable barriers they faced are starkly illustrated by their post-war careers: only one Tuskegee Airman successfully transitioned his military aviation expertise into a pilot position with a major commercial airline. In this paper, we document how the exceptional talents of these individuals were systematically squandered in the post-war period.

• The Politics of Indian Textbooks (with Cyril Thomson)

  Preview

  Textbooks are a staple of education from primary school through university. Beyond transmitting knowledge, they also convey ideologies and values. This project investigates the influence of political shifts on the content of educational materials. We compile a corpus of over 6,000 textbooks published by Indian governments and employ state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze how the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has affected the ideological content of these texts.

• AI for Research

  • A list of resources on how to use AI for text analysis, historical data collection, writing assistance, and English accent coach.

• Data Gallery

  • A list of datasets and data collection tools, with a particular focus on economic history.

您好，欢迎访问我的个人网站！我是科隆大学的博士后研究员。点击 此处 可以阅读我的英文简历。 欢迎浏览我的英文网站获取更多关于我的信息。

我的研究兴趣是经济史、政治经济学。