I study economic change with messy data. Find my work below.
I work on economic and industrial development, political economy, and establishing basic facts around industrial policy. I tackle these questions with the Industrial Policy Group.
I also enjoy working with computational tools and bridging the worlds of data science and economics. Find my GitHub here.
I study the impact of industrial policy on industrial development by considering an important episode during the East Asian miracle: South Korea's heavy and chemical industry (HCI) drive, 1973--1979. Based on newly assembled data, I use the introduction and termination of industrial policies to study their impacts during and after the intervention period.
Does the human rights spotlight impact multinationals? We evaluate the effect of publicizing human rights violations on firm value, focusing on salient events at the center of international campaigns: the assassination of environmental activists.
We examine the ways in which political realities shape industrial policy through the lens of modern political economy. We argue that government failure is not a necessary feature of industrial policy but is more likely when countries pursue policies beyond their governance capacity constraints.
We review the recent literature on industrial policy, providing a critical assessment of new theoretical insights and empirical evidence. We argue that new economic research offers a more positive perspective on industrial policy than earlier work, while acknowledging important caveats and limitations.
A review of how new econometric work is confronting the empirical challenges of studying industrial policy interventions. Through careful research design and attention to institutional detail, emergent studies are rapidly expanding what we know about these policies.
This study examines how the historical state conditions long-run development, using Vietnam as a laboratory.
We provide a new, text-based approach to measuring industrial policy at scale and deliver a global data set on industrial policy practice.
This paper documents and quantifies the magnitude of industrial policies in the global semiconductor sector since the passage of the CHIPS Act in the United States. We provide a comprehensive examination of semiconductor industrial policies globally, their rationale, and their potential economic impacts including cross-border effects.
Nathan Lane • 2025