Trade and the Rise of Ancient Greek City-states

Abstract : This paper examines the role of trade in the development of city-states. I first combine the Hecksher-Ohlin model of trade with the Tullock model of conflict to show how potential crop diversity interacts with trade to affect both production, appropriation, and defense. I then examine how the spatial-covariance of vegetation affects the adoption of coined money, entering battles, and unifying politically within ancient Greece. For all outcomes, semi-parametric hypothesis-tests show the spatial-covariance terms are both economically and statistically significant, but not whether there is more or less of any key crop.

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Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai’s Concession Era

Abstract : Intellectual property (IP) institutions have been a salient topic of economic research and a prime cause of political disputes, including the latest U.S.-China trade war. In this paper, we investigate the effects of trademark protection, an under-examined form of IP protection, by exploring a historical precedent: China's trademark law of 1923---a law enacted not to protect the domestic economy; but an unanticipated, disapproved response to end conflicts between foreign powers. Exploiting a unique, newly digitized firm-level dataset from Shanghai in 1870-1941 and bilateral product-level data on Chinese imports in 1920-1928, we show that the trademark law spurred employment and trade growth, domestic integration, and brand advertising for Western firms with greater dependence on trademark protection. In contrast, Japanese businesses, who had frequently been accused of counterfeiting, experienced employment contractions. Finally, we show that previous attempts by foreign powers to strengthen trademark protection --- such as extraterritoriality rights, bilateral commercial treaties, and an unenforced legal trademark code --- were ultimately unsuccessful.

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Acquisitions, Management and Efficiency in Rwanda's Coffee Industry

Abstract : Markets in low-income countries often display long tails of inefficient firms and significant misallocation. This paper studies Rwandan coffee mills, an industry initially characterized by widespread inefficiencies that has recently seen a process of consolidation in which exporters have acquired control of a significant number of mills giving rise to multi-plant groups. We combine administrative data with original surveys of both mills and acquirers to understand the consequences of this consolidation. Difference-in-difference results suggest that, controlling for mill and year fixed effects, a mill acquired by a foreign group, but not by a domestic group, improves both productivity and product quality. The difference in performance is not accompanied by changes in mill technology or differential access to finance. Upon acquisition, both foreign and domestic group change mills' managers. Foreign groups, however, recruit younger, more educated and higher ability managers, pay these managers a higher salary (even conditional on manager and mill characteristics) and grant them more autonomy. These “better” managers explain about half of the better performance associated with foreign ownership. The difference in performance reflects superior implementation, rather than management knowledge: following an acquisition, managers in domestic and foreign groups try to implement the same management changes but managers in domestic groups report significantly higher resistance from both workers and farmers and fail to implement the changes. The results have implications for our understanding of organizational change and for fostering market development in emerging markets.

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