Job Market Paper
Professional Societies and the Social Dynamics of Innovation
Few economies have ever reached the global technological frontier; Germany did, moving from industrial laggard in 1850 to world leader in chemistry, electrical machinery, and precision instruments by 1900. I study the social organization of knowledge behind that catch-up: the German Engineering Society, a voluntary professional body whose local chapters brought working engineers together through lectures, factory visits, and a technical journal. Exploiting the staggered founding of 22 chapters in a difference-in-differences design on high-value patents, I find that chapter founding raises patenting by four percent a year — cumulating over fifteen years to roughly 60 percent of the average unit’s patent stock — with flat pre-trends and no effect on patent classes outside the Society’s scope. Chapters amplified capacity already in place: patenting rose most where members concentrated, in technologies of prior regional specialization, and among owner-engineers rather than credentialed graduates. Localized knowledge spillovers, organized through a professional society, emerge as a distinct input to innovation, complementary to formal education and patent rights.
Working Papers
Pricing the Ecosystem Services of U.S. Peatlands
Peatlands hold roughly twice the carbon of the world’s forests on three percent of its land, and drained peat now emits over a gigatonne of CO2 a year. This paper takes a first step toward pricing the ecosystem services of U.S. peatlands, valuing the two for which parcel-level measurement now exists: carbon and flood mitigation. Combining a 30 m USDA Forest Service raster of peatland CO2 reduction potential with the Nolte (2020) land-value raster and the Taylor and Druckenmiller (2022) wetland flood-mitigation raster, we compute the cost of conserving every peatland cell in the conterminous United States and trace the national supply curve. At a 20-year contract and 4 percent discount rate, 79 percent of U.S. peatland can be conserved at or below $50 per tonne CO2, securing 28.6 MtCO2 per year — 93 percent of national peatland emissions — for $14 billion in present value while displacing under two percent of U.S. corn output. Wetland flood-mitigation benefits, which accrue downstream and go unpriced in land markets, add roughly $15 billion in present value over the same set and are concentrated almost entirely in the cheapest quarter of peatland, which is worth conserving on flood protection alone. Because biodiversity, water purification, and recreation remain unpriced, these figures understate the value of conservation.
How German Viticulture Shaped “Hidden Champions”
This paper studies the long-term contribution of viticulture to regional development in Germany, focusing on Hidden Champions — little-known yet globally leading firms in niche markets that form a cornerstone of Germany’s export-oriented industrial success. Using data on all German municipalities, and instrumenting viticulture with the Huglin Index — a climate-based measure of climatic suitability for wine growing — I find that the presence of viticulture increases the number of Hidden Champions in a municipality by 31%. I argue that, unlike staple crops, wine cultivation demanded a broader and more technically diverse skill set, fostering the emergence of technically oriented firms that ultimately evolved into Hidden Champions.