"Closing Ranks: Organized Labor and Immigration"
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy
[PDF] [SSRN] [CESifo WP]
This paper shows that immigration fostered the emergence of organized labor in the United States. I digitize archival records to assemble the first county-level dataset on historical U.S. union membership and use a shift-share instrument to isolate a plausibly exogenous labor supply shock induced by immigration, between 1900 and 1920. Counties with higher immigration experienced increases in union presence, the number of union branches, the share of unionized workers, and the number of union members per branch. These effects were more pronounced among skilled workers, particularly in counties more exposed to labor competition from immigrants, and in areas with more negative attitudes toward immigrants. The evidence is consistent with existing workers unionizing in response to immigration, driven by both economic and social motivations. These findings highlight a novel driver of unionization in the early 20th-century United States and reveal an unexplored consequence of immigration: the development of institutions aimed at protecting workers’ status in the labor market, with effects that persist to the present.
"The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the Economic Development of the Western U.S." (with Joe Long, Nancy Qian, and Marco Tabellini)
[PDF] [NBER WP] [CEPR DP]
Media coverage: The New Yorker, NPR ("All Things Considered"), NPR ("The Indicator"), NPR ("Planet Money"), Forbes, Bloomberg ("BusinessWeek Daily"), Bloomberg ("New Economy")
Featured in: NBER ("The Digest"), VoxEU, Harvard Business School ("Working Knowledge"), Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, Hoover Institution ("Economics, Applied"), Reason, Macro Roundup
This paper investigates the economic consequences of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned immigration from China. The Act reduced the number of Chinese workers of all skill levels living in the United States. It also reduced the labor supply and the quality of jobs held by white and U.S.-born workers, the intended beneficiaries of the Act, and reduced manufacturing output. The results suggest that the Chinese Exclusion Act slowed economic growth in western states until at least 1940.
"Political Appointments, Careers, and Performance in the Civil Service: Evidence from U.S. Federal Judges" (with Massimo Pulejo)
[draft available upon request]
This paper studies the role of political appointments on the performance and career trajectories of civil servants. The focus is on U.S. federal judges, who are nominated by the president based on recommendations from their home-state senators. Leveraging individual-level data on judges and senators from 1789 to 2019, we employ difference-in-differences and event-study designs to compare judges' performance before and after their recommending senators leave office. Following their recommenders' exit from Congress, judges' performance decline. These negatives effects manifest in both quantity, as measured by fewer judicial opinions authored and a larger backlog of civil cases, and quality, indicated by shorter opinions and fewer citations made and received. The results are consistent with an erosion of career prospects driving the effects: after their recommenders leave office, district court judges become less likely to be promoted to upper-level courts. The findings highlight how political appointments can incentivize civil servants through career concerns but also show that these incentives are closely tied to the tenure of their political sponsors.
Project made possible thanks to the Visitinps Scholars program, granting access to the universe of Italian Social Security Data.
"Political Cycles in Black Union Membership"