Guohui Jiang

Bio

I am a postdoc in the Department of Economics, University of Cologne.

I am an applied microeconomist with research interests in economic history and political economy. I received my PhD from University of Zurich in 2025.

How to pronounce Guohui?

Contact

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Email: guohui_jiang@icloud.com or g.jiang@wiso.uni-koeln.de

Twitter: @guohui_jiang

Working Papers

• Fairness and Cooperation: Draft Dodging by the Rich and War Morale in World War II
  [Abstract]
  This paper demonstrates that draft avoidance by the rich undermined war morale in the US during WWII. Using newly digitized individual-level draft records, I show that men whose richer neighbors received more draft exemptions volunteered less, filed more draft appeals, and deserted more. To identify the causal effect, I use an instrument based on randomly assigned draft lottery numbers. By randomly setting the sequence of case reviews, the lottery gave some men more time to prepare their case for an exemption. Heterogeneity analyses and evidence from local newspapers are consistent with a mechanism where individuals perceived the unequal, class-based sharing of the wartime burden as unfair.

Work in Progress

• Better Beings: Education, Progressive Reform and Eugenics in the United States (with Elliott Ash, Hans-Joachim Voth, and Noam Yuchtman)
  [Abstract]
  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)
  [Abstract]
  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)
  [Abstract]
  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.
• Time-Locked LLMs for Historical Reasoning (with Daniel Göttlich, Dominik Loibner, and Hans-Joachim Voth)
  [Abstract]
  It's a time machine, isn't it? See more here.

Public Goods

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