Julian Dyer

The Fruits (and Vegetables) of Crime: Protection from Theft and Agricultural Development

In Press, Journal of Development Economics, 2023

I use evidence from a cluster-randomized field experiment in Kenya to show that improved protection of farms impacts planting and time use decisions, as well as crop yields. I randomly allocated subsidized watchmen to farmers in Kenya, reducing their perceived risk of theft. Farmers offered watchmen reallocated an additional 9% of their land as a result of improved security and reported selling more of their crops off-farm. In addition, the value of farm output per acre increased by 15% of the control mean. Despite these benefits, this intervention does not appear to be optimal for an individual farmer.
Draft , Open Access Published Version
Blog Posts: World Bank Development Impact , GlobalDev , VoxDev
Pre-Analysis Plan

Pumps, Prosperity and Household Power: Experimental Evidence on Irrigation Pumps (with Jeremy Shapiro)

Journal of Development Economics, Volume 163, 2023

This paper provides the results of an RCT impact evaluation of household irrigation pumps in Kenya, where we randomly allocated free pumps to the female head of household via public lotteries. Pumps increase net farm revenue by approximately 13% of the control mean, and pay for themselves within three seasons. Farmers with irrigation pumps spent less time on off-farm economic activity. Finally, female decisionmaking power increased and domestic violence decreased among treatment households.
Current Draft , Open Access Published Version , VoxDev Blog Post

Reconstructing History: Words as Historical Artifacts (with Arthur Blouin)

Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Economic History

This article introduces and evaluates a purely data-driven approach that is able to exploit - at scale - the historical information encoded in language to estimate the geographic origins of a broad range of historical phenomena. We apply the methodology by tracing religious words back to their originating languages to estimate the geographic origin of five major religions. The estimates suggest that linguistic evidence tends to track the history of ideas or concepts rather than people or societies, which may help to explain disparities between linguistic and archaeological evidence.
Draft available on request.

How Cultures Converge: An Empirical Investigation of Trade and Linguistic Exchange (with Arthur Blouin)

This paper empirically investigates how economic incentives shape cultural convergence. We construct welfare gains from agricultural trade, and show how this relates to cultural exchange using loanwords data. In particular, we show that improved gains from trade causes cultural convergence, but that economic leverage determines the direction of convergence.
Current Draft

Diversity and the World's Endangered Languages (with Arthur Blouin)

Ninety percent of the world’s languages face extinction within the next century. Many social scientists attribute this to increased trade, despite a lack of empirical work exploring this relationship. This paper empirically tests whether mutual trade incentives affect language vitality for thousands of ethnolinguistic groups. We find that at the language level, groups that are more likely to trade are less likely to face extinction, in contrast to claims that trade is a threat to diversity. In fact, greater mutual trade incentives are significantly associated with more ethnolingusitic fractionalization at the country level.
Current Draft

Climate Forecasting, Adaptation, and Legitimacy (with Dennis Ochieng and Ellen Dyer)

Fight for their rights? The cultural and economic ramifications of colonial alignment and resistance (with Arthur Blouin)

In this project we explore the effects of colonial rule on the social fabric of colonised regions. Using novel data on linguistic transfer and narratives extracted from colonial archives, we show that uneven experience of colonisation reduced intergroup cooperation and economic integration between those who aligned themselves with colonisers and those who resisted.
(Draft and slides coming soon.)

BEEM012 -- Applied Econometrics 2

BEEM160 -- Development Research Methods