We introduce a novel machine learning approach to leverage historical and contemporary maps and systematically predict economic statistics. Our simple algorithm extracts meaningful features from the maps based on their color compositions for predictions. We apply our method to grid-level...

Does war have important long-term economic consequences? Existing literature suggests a lack of long-term effects related to the short-term destruction of physical capital and population reduction. Increased ideological and social division as a result of war, on the other hand, may produce...

Ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity are widely studied as determinants of social capital, conflict, and institutional quality. In many cultures, another important dimension of heterogeneity is family clan membership. I study the relationship between family clan diversity in South Korean villages...

We empirically test the economic impacts of the introduction of the Korean high speed rail system, the Korea Train Express (KTX), in 2004. For analysis, we use nighttime light data from satellite observations as a proxy for local economic activity and construct a 20-year panel data set at the...