This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism, and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize these ideas and connect them with my research on innovation and technology. The framework is centered around a utility-technology possibilities frontier, which delineates the possible distributions of resources in a society both for given technology and working via different technological choices. It highlights how various types of institutions, market structures, norms, and ideologies influence moves along the frontier and shifts of the frontier, and it provides a simple formalization of the social forces that lead to institutional persistence and those that can trigger institutional change. The framework also enables us to conceptualize how, during periods of disruption, existing—and sometimes quite small—differences can have amplified effects on prosperity and institutional trajectories. In this way, it suggests some parallels between different disruptive periods, including the onset of European colonialism, the spread (or lack thereof) of industrial technologies in the nineteenth century, and decisions related to the use, adoption, and development of AI today.

At the turn of the twentieth century, most cities in America featured a patronage-based system of governance, but over the next few decades, patronage was replaced by civil service. Civil service restructured the relationship between elected officials and government employees, with employees benefiting from a variety of new protections. Yet in studying this change, scholars have largely ignored the role local employees themselves might have played in the transformation. We argue that city employees stood to benefit from civil service, and in places where they had agency and clout, they were important drivers of its adoption. We collected a dataset for more than 1,000 municipal governments, determining whether and when they adopted civil service and whether their employees were organized in an occupational organization. Our analysis of these new data shows the influence of city employees was an important contributor to the spread of civil service in American local government.

In most evaluation systems—such as those governing the allocation of prestigious awards—the evaluator’s primary task is to reward the highest quality candidates. However, these systems are imperfect; top performers may not be acknowledged and thus be underrecognized, and low performers may receive unwarranted recognition and thus be overrecognized. An important feature of many evaluation systems is that people alternate between being candidates and being evaluators. How does experiencing misrecognition as a candidate affect how people subsequently evaluate others? We develop novel theory that underrecognition and overrecognition lead people to reproduce those experiences when they are evaluators. Across three studies—a quasi-natural experiment and two preregistered, multistage experiments, we find that underrecognized evaluators are less likely to grant recognition to others—even to the highest-performing candidates. Conversely, overrecognized evaluators are more likely to grant rewards to others—even to the lowest-performing candidates. Whereas underrecognized evaluator behavior is driven by individuals’ perceptions that their experience was unfair, overrecognized evaluator behavior is driven by the informational cues people glean on how to evaluate others. Thus, in evaluation processes where people oscillate between being the evaluated and being the evaluator, we show how and why seemingly innocuous initial inefficiencies are reproduced in subsequent evaluations.

Extreme precipitation events with large spatial extents may have more severe impacts than localized events as they can lead to widespread flooding. It is debated how climate change may affect the spatial extent of precipitation extremes, whose investigation often directly relies on simulations of precipitation from climate models. Here, we use a different strategy to investigate how future changes in spatial extents of precipitation extremes differ across climate zones and seasons in two river basins (Danube and Mississippi). We rely on observed precipitation extremes while exploiting a physics-based average-temperature covariate, enabling us to project future precipitation extents based on projected temperatures. We include the covariate into newly developed time-varying r-Pareto processes using suitably chosen spatial risk functionals r. This model captures temporal non-stationarity in the spatial dependence structure of precipitation extremes by linking it to the temperature covariate, derived from reanalysis data (ERA5-Land) for model calibration and from bias-corrected climate simulations (CMIP6) for projections. Our results show an increasing trend in the margins, with both significantly positive or negative trend coefficients depending on season and river (sub-)basin. During major rainy seasons, the significant trends indicate that future spatial extreme events will become relatively more intense and localized in several sub-basins. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

Friendships between low-wage migrant workers can provide mutual support and information, as well as generate suspicion, jealousy, and competition. Indonesian and Filipino migrant women in Chile maintain counter-intuitive social relations where, despite never fully resolving ongoing conflicts over money, men, or reputations, women continue to attend to new emergencies and provide significant economic, practical, or emotional support to one another. Such friendships take on a hostile quality, where women can be aggressive or antagonistic while caring for the other's needs. These friendships that endure despite open wounds raise questions about the nature of care and obligation in contemporary urban nonkin relations. They highlight how women affectively navigate the potential harm of friendship to survive structural and everyday violence from other social relations. In decentering the role of positive affect in analyses of friendship and caring relations, I propose that a focus on such “ambivalent relationality” can present us with more realistic, although perhaps unromantic, models of how to care for one another in an imperfect world.

Working with never-published agricultural data collected for Mexico’s pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition, this article argues that manuscript and published statistics represent a space to see state making as a multisided, ongoing process. Whereas historians have largely looked at statistics from the perspective of the state, highlighting bureaucrats’ projections of desired realities and political projects, here I show how local enumerators’ investment in statistical undertakings asserted space for conversations and arguments about the nature and composition of the political or economic whole being represented. I present a methodology for working with historical statistics that takes aberrations, anomalies, and unruly data as signposts to be followed rather than errors to be corrected. In doing so, I argue for seeing not only the frustrated yet durable aspirations of statesmen but also the ways those beyond the central state reforged, reinforced, and remade representations of their homes through engagement with and investment in statistical practices.

Since the 1970s, hundreds of randomized trials have examined the effects of psychotherapies for depression, and this number is increasing every year. In this study, we report outcomes from a living systematic review of these studies. We use Poisson regression analyses to examine if the proportions of studies have changed over time across the characteristics of the participants, therapies, and studies. We also present a meta-analysis of the effects across the major types, formats, targets, and age groups. We included 562 randomized controlled trials (669 comparisons; 66,361 patients). Most trials are conducted in adults and the relative proportion of trials in children and adolescents, as well as in older patients is significantly decreasing. The effects in children and adolescents are also significantly smaller than in adults (p = .007). Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is by far the best examined type of therapy (52%), but not necessarily more effective than other therapies. Over time, the proportion of studies examining several other types of therapy is significantly decreased compared to CBT. The quality of trials has increased over time, but still, a majority do not meet basic quality criteria, not even in recent years. The effects found in studies with low risk of bias are significantly smaller than in other studies (b = −0.21; SE = 0.05; p < .001). Most trials are conducted in the United States, but the proportion of studies in other parts of the world is rapidly increasing. The evidence that psychotherapies are effective is strong and growing every year.