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 technology stimulates further innovation in applications beyond those...

Data-intensive technologies, like AI, are increasingly widespread. We argue that the direction of innovation and growth in data-intensive economies may be crucially shaped by the state because: (i) the state is a key collector of data and (ii) data is sharable across uses within firms,...

We document three facts about the global diffusion of surveillance AI technology, and in particular, the role played by China. First, China has a comparative advantage in this technology. It is substantially more likely to export surveillance AI than other countries, and particularly so as...

Venture capital plays an important role in funding and shaping innovation outcomes, characterized by investors' deep knowledge of the technology, industry, and institutions, as well as their long-running relationships with the entrepreneurship and innovation community. China, in its pursuit of...

The decision to protest is strategic: an individual's participation is a function of her beliefs about others' turnout. Models of protest often assume strategic complementarity; however, the challenge of collective action suggests strategic substitutability. We conduct the first field experiment...

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students' stated beliefs and attitudes. We exploit a major textbook reform in China that was rolled out between 2004 and 2010 with the explicit intention of shaping youths' ideology. To measure its effect, we present evidence from a novel survey...

Citizens have long taken to the streets to demand change, expressing political views that may otherwise be suppressed. Protests have produced change at local, national, and international scales, including spectacular moments of political and social transformation. We document five new empirical...

We argue that recoveries from demand-driven recessions with expenditure cuts concentrated in services or non-durables will tend to be weaker than recoveries from recessions more biased towards durables. Intuitively, the smaller the bias towards more durable goods, the less the recovery is...

Why are some technological transitions particularly unequal and slow to play out? We develop a theory to study transitions after technological innovations driven by worker reallocation within a generation and changes in the skill distribution across generations. The economy's transitional...

We argue that the time-varying regional distribution of housing equity influences the aggregate consequences of monetary policy through its effects on mortgage refinancing. Using detailed loan-level data, we show that regional differences in housing equity affect refinancing and spending...