Job Market Paper
Engineering Societies, Patents, and the 19th-Century Catch-Up
Few economies have ever reached the global technological frontier, and fewer still have stayed there; existing work identifies formal inputs to that transition, but the organisational layer through which they combine into innovative effort has received less attention. Germany’s late-19th-century catch-up in chemistry, electrical machinery, and precision instruments was coordinated in part by the German Engineering Society, which built a national network of local chapters organising practical engineering knowledge through monthly meetings, factory visits, and a weekly technical journal. Exploiting the staggered founding of 22 chapters over 1877–1918 in a Callaway–Sant’Anna design on the Streb–Baten high-value patent corpus, I estimate that chapter founding raises annual patenting by roughly four percent, with flat pre-trends and a null outside the Society’s technical scope. The response operates through strengthening existing capacity and through practical owner-engineers rather than credentialed graduates, identifying the professional organisation of practical knowledge as a channel for innovation capacity that complements formal education and patent rights.
Work in Progress
Pricing the Ecosystem Services of U.S. Peatlands
We construct the first parcel-scale marginal abatement cost curve for U.S. peatland conservation, overlaying a new 30 m USDA Forest Service peatland flux raster on the Nolte (2020) land-value raster and the Taylor and Druckenmiller (2022) wetland flood-mitigation raster. At a 20-year contract horizon and 4 percent discount rate, 80 percent of U.S. peatland is conservable at or below $50/tCO2 and 47 percent at or below $25/tCO2, with the $50 enrollment costing roughly $17B in present value while securing about 28 MtCO2 per year of avoided emissions and displacing less than two percent of U.S. corn output. Within-county dispersion in abatement cost is comparable to across-county dispersion, identifying spatial targeting rather than a uniform per-hectare payment as the binding policy lever. Once flood benefits are netted out, more than 140,000 ha clear the welfare threshold at a zero carbon price.
How German Viticulture Shaped “Hidden Champions”
This paper investigates the long-term contribution of viticulture to regional growth in Germany, focusing on Hidden Champions—publicly unknown yet globally leading firms in niche markets—that form the foundation of Germany’s export-oriented, industrial-driven success. Using municipality-level data, I employ the Huglin index, a climate-based instrumental variable for wine cultivation, to identify the effect of viticulture on the presence of Hidden Champions. The presence of viticulture within a municipality increases the number of Hidden Champions by 31 percent. Unlike other agricultural crops, wine cultivation demands a broader and more technically diverse skill set, which contributed to the emergence of technically oriented firms that ultimately evolved into Hidden Champions.