A few minutes ago, I finished reading about Africa's expanding infrastructure. It’s hard to imagine that in just a few decades, roads, railways, ports, and airports will link every corner of the continent. With over 1,200 km of the Algeria East-West Highway and 4,500 km

The Entire Railway Network of the World 🚞

Ever wonder who is funding the foreign policy experts quoted in media and testifying to Congress? Introducing the Think Tank Funding Tracker.

***📢 DATA UPDATE *** Central Bank Independence: 192 countries, 1970-2023 The most comprehensive #dataset on #CentralBanks is updated and available at sites.google.com/site/carogarri… What’s new about #CBI?

I am glad to inform you that our special issue “Text as Data in the Study of Politics in Developing Countries” is out in the Developing Economies! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17461049/2…

The narrative about China's "debt-trap diplomacy" in Africa is complete bullshit. A study that looked at more than 1,000 loans to Africa found that Chinese lenders never seized assets, never used courts to enforce payments, and never applied penalty interest rates.

"The findings conclude that U.S. sanctions on China’s semiconductor industry are positively correlated with its development. Sanctions from the United States may stimulate the growth of China’s independent semiconductor industry." link.springer.com/article/10.100…

How accurately do citations reflect the original research? Do authors truly engage with what they cite? In a new study [arxiv.org/abs/2502.20581] with David Jurgens is now on BlueSky only and Misha Teplitskiy | Science of Science, we analyze millions of citation sentence pairs to measure citation fidelity and reveal how

New working paper with Ronan Tallec and Anne Alonzo on how parliamentary politics shaped one of the largest infrastructure programs in French history: the Freycinet plan. Link :👇

The Review of International Organizations invites papers using geocoded data on foreign aid for a special issue “Analyzing Global Development with the Geocoded Official Development Assistance Dataset (GODAD).” See godad.me, godad.uni-goettingen.de/uploads/RIO_GO…

State Formation vs State Building: Some of the best chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy (2024) found the distinction useful:

"National Elections Database," including the results of 1,023 presidential and 2,962 parliamentary elections conducted worldwide since 1946! From Vincent Pons, Benjamin Marx and Vincent Rollet. The companion paper: restud.com/electoral-turn… #EconSky #Elections

NEW - Is It Still the Economy? Economic Voting in Polarized Politics - cup.org/4bYvAYD "polarization affects economic evaluation and clouds the responsibility for economic conditions, decreasing voters’ willingness to sanction..." - Thiago Moreira #OpenAccess

1/9 New working paper AidData: using survey experiments, David Bulman, Kerry Ratigan and I find that China is the least favored lender among the public across developing countries. The public prefers loans from the IMF, the World Bank, and the U.S. aiddata.org/publications/f…

🚨 Our latest paper is out today in Science! We uncover stark and systematic partisan differences in the amount, content, and character of science used in policy, which mirror differences in political elites’ trust in science. Four years in the making. Led by Zander Furnas 1/n

How important was the railroad, and why did it raise incomes? Dave Donaldson’s classic paper “Railroads of the Raj” found that access to the railroad raised real income by 16%, and trade accounted for half. Let’s understand how he got this! 1/

Delighted to share my new article in International Politics, as part of a special issue on alliances, guest edited by Josh Shifrinson and Jessica Darden. The article creates a new dataset on China's 109 strategic partnerships and examines the rationale of its partnership strategy

How valuable was the railroad to American economic growth? Somewhere between not at all, and more than anything else. Let's learn about the railroad, and along the way, learn something about the meaning of counterfactuals! 1/

As the political rift between the #US & #Europe is deepening, it was great to meet & exchange w/ stellar colleagues from both sides of the Atlantic about the US withdrawal from the int' order, its future, and Europe's role within it at the 2025 CES Conference in Philly.

1/ Week 28: Theory paper in focus this week is the seminal article by Anthony Atkinson and Joseph E. Stiglitz that is now famously referred to as the "zero commodity/capital taxation" benchmark in public economics. It has led to much technical & policy debates. Let's find out.