Results

Blog

Project Syndicate:

China is exporting its AI surveillance state

Contrary to what many Western policymakers and commentators once hoped, recent analyses have added to the evidence that trade does not always foster democracy or liberalize regimes. Instead, China's greater integration w...Read more...

Blog

VoxDev:

How the surveillance state is exported through trade in AI

Autocracies and weak democracies are more likely to import facial recognition AI from China, particularly in years when they experience domestic unrest, say Martin Beraja, Andrew Kao, David Yang and Noam Yuchtman....Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Dissecting the sinews of power: international trade and the rise of Britain's fiscal-military state, 1689-1823

We evaluate the role of taxes on trade in the development of imperial Britain's fiscal-military state. Influential work, e.g., Brewer's (1989) Sinews of Power, attributed increased fiscal capacity to the taxation of dome...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

Observing freedom's vanishing act

The political equilibrium in Hong Kong was fundamentally altered in June 2020, when the Chinese Communist Party began coercively suppressing all protest. Noam Yuchtman provides a first-hand account of watching civil libe...Read more...

Chapter

Curriculum and ideology: evidence from China

in Nation building: big lessons from successes and failures

This book presents a synthesis of key recent advances in political-economy research on the various approaches and strategies used in the process of building nations throughout modern history. The book is comprised of 26 ...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics: Forthcoming

Data-intensive innovation and the state: evidence from AI firms in China

Developing AI technology requires data. In many domains, government data far exceeds in magnitude and scope data collected by the private sector, and AI firms often gain access to such data when providing services to the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Political adverse selection

We study how the politicization of policies designed to correct market failures can undermine their effectiveness. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was among the most politically divisive expansions o...Read more...

Blog

VoxTalks Economics:

AI: software for autocrats? (podcast)

The Chinese government isn't just a world leader in the use of AI for facial recognition, its orders are funding innovation in its domestic industry too. But what's good news for entrepreneurs may be bad news for politic...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Autocratic AI dystopias: from science fiction to social science fact

The growth of artificial intelligence technology brings the potential of a 'fourth industrial revolution', but also poses challenges for democratic institutions. This column analyses the mutually reinforcing relationship...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

AI-tocracy

Can frontier innovation be sustained under autocracy? We argue that innovation and autocracy can be mutually reinforcing when: (i) the new technology bolsters the autocrat's power; and (ii) the autocrat's demand for the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Data-intensive innovation and the State: evidence from AI firms in China

Artificial intelligence (AI) innovation is data-intensive. States have historically collected large amounts of data, which is now being used by AI firms. Gathering comprehensive information on firms and government procur...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Protests as strategic games: Experimental evidence from Hong Kong's antiauthoritarian movement

Social scientists have long viewed the decision to protest as strategic, with an individual's participation a function of their beliefs about others' turnout. We conduct a framed field experiment that recalibrates indivi...Read more...

Journal article

Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Religious competition and reallocation: The political economy of secularization in the protestant reformation

Using novel microdata, we document an important, unintended consequence ofthe Protestant Reformation: a reallocation ofresources from religious to secular purposes. To understand this process, we propose a conceptual fra...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reallocation and secularization: the economic consequences of the protestant reformation

The Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, was both a shock to the market for religion and a first-order economic shock. We study its impact on the allocation of resources between the religious and secular sectors in...Read more...