How much does the effect of industrial policy depend on the capacity of the bureaucrats implementing it? We exploit the rotation schedule of managers of South Korea's export promotion offices in 87 countries between 1965 and 2000 to show that a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat ability boosts product-level exports by 37%, while the policy increases exports by 38% on average. Together, this implies the export promotion policy has no effect when implemented by a bureaucrat one standard deviation below average. Under higher-ability bureaucrats, South Korean exports respond more strongly to destination import demand and expand more for products prone to information frictions, suggesting more effective transmission of market information. We find that performance in the first appointment predicts whether a bureaucrat sees subsequent appointments, highlighting performance-based screening of bureaucrats as a mechanism that increases the policy's effect.

We study the causes of high turnover rates in a flagship industrial park in Ethiopia with detailed administrative records for 58,530 applicants during 2018–23. (1) Leveraging exogenous price shocks, we find that better outside options reduced the likelihood that applicants take any jobs in the industrial park but did not induce current workers to separate. A simple job search model can explain the effect of price shocks on applicants. (2) Using productivity data from individual firms, we find evidence that workers with lower productivity were more likely to separate. A simple model with workers learning about their productivity on the job can partially explain the correlation. The findings suggest that high turnover is not necessarily an indicator of “bad jobs”, but rather a depiction of a competitive local labor market with many young, inexperienced workers.

How did geopolitics shape East Asia’s economic development? We find that U.S. military procurement during the Vietnam War—a shock which peaked at nearly 3% of South Korean GDP, rivaling the Marshall Plan—catalyzed Korea’s export-led industrialization. We construct a new firm-level dataset that matches Korean export records with U.S. procurement contracts awarded between 1965 and 1974 to estimate the causal impact of winning a contract on export performance. A firm winning its first contract raises its likelihood of exporting by 14.7 percentage points and its export value by 40%. Treated firms are more likely to expand into third-country markets and export manufacturing products—and these gains are unlikely to come from business stealing. Finally, we find that U.S. procurement and domestic industrial policy were likely complementary. Our findings reveal a neglected channel through which Cold War geopolitics shaped the East Asian economic miracle.

We show that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–68, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. Our results suggest that mass vaccination against measles increased the years of education on average by about 0.1 years in the affected cohorts. We also find tentative evidence that the college graduation rate of men increased.