Manufacturing Revolutions - Industrial Policy and Networks in South Korea. This chapter uses a historic big push intervention and newly digitized data from South Korea to study the effects of industrial policy on industrial development. In 1973 South Korea transitioned to a military dictatorship and drastically changed their development strategy. I find industries targeted by the regime's big push grew significantly more than non-targeted industries along several key dimensions of industrial development. These developmental effects persisted after industrial policies were retrenched, following the 1979 assassination of the president. Furthermore, I estimate the spillovers of the industrial policies using exogenous variation in the exposure to the policy across the input-output network. I find evidence of persistent pecuniary externalities like those posited by big push development theorists, such as Albert Hirschman. In other words, I find that South Korea's controversial industrial policy was successful in producing industrial development, the benefits of which persisted through time and in industries not directly targeted by the policies.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward - The Green Revolution and Structural Change in the Philippines. This study explores the short- and long-run impacts of the green revolution on structural transformation. The setting is the revolution’s home country: the Philippines. In 1966, the Philippine’s experienced the widespread introduction of so-called “miracle rice” varieties, invented at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Laguna. The island republic experienced large gains to agricultural productivity as a result. Using a newly constructed panel of Philippine municipalities, I show that growth in agricultural productivity led to unexpected patterns of structural transformation. In the short-run, the green revolution translated into labor-absorbing technological change, reallocating labor into HYV-intensive rice economies. However, in the long-run, the rising relative cost of labor, meant that rice farms mechanized and displaced the Philippine peasantry into the service sector.

The Historical State, Local Collective Action, and Economic Development in Vietnam. This study examines how the historical state conditions long-run development, using Vietnam as a laboratory. Northern Vietnam (Dai Viet) was ruled by a strong centralized state in which the village was the fundamental administrative unit. Southern Vietnam was a peripheral tributary of the Khmer (Cambodian) Empire, which followed a patron-client model with weaker, more personalized power relations and no village intermediation. Using a regression discontinuity design across the Dai Viet-Khmer boundary, the study shows that areas historically under a strong state have higher living standards today and better economic outcomes over the past 150 years. Rich historical data document that in villages with a strong historical state, citizens have been better able to organize for public goods and redistribution through civil society and local government. This suggests that the strong historical state crowded in village-level collective action and that these norms persisted long after the original state disappeared.