Emailing all of my coauthors asking: “do you consider us to be *close* coauthors, or just normal ones?”

Congrats Clint! Very cool!

the single image every genuinely freedom-loving american has been waiting for

Wondering if I should infer that the mild ones are your go-to (hence running low) or that you keep them around in the event of a low spice tolerance visitor…

Congrats again, Reilly, such great news for us. And I believe that, as an *associate* professor, academic tradition dictates that beers are on you from now on 😌

Tons more stuff in the paper. Please check it out (www.calvinthrall.com/assets/chamb...) - comments very welcome!

Using this data, I show that—as predicted—in cities with low levels of industrial diversification, dominant industries are *less likely* to join the local chamber. When diversification is high, chambers are much more representative of their local economies.

To test the mechanism, I scrape full membership directories for 20 local chambers. Comparing member counts to admin data on the total number of enterprises per city suggests an average membership rate of 15%—MASSIVE compared to most civil orgs. Local business is very organized!

TLDR: using a novel shift-share instrument, I show industrial diversification is a strong predictor of both municipal and county chamber formation during the 1970-2015 period. Lots of robustness stuff too (check out the paper).

To test the theory, I collect novel data on 11,000+ past and present local chambers in the U.S. from state corporate registries (thanks to @opencorporates.bsky.social ). I show that the number of U.S. municipalities and counties with their own chamber sharply increased over the 20th c.

I theorize that this makes local level business organization more favorable: when firms’ industry competitors are more geographically dispersed, any locally-specific policy benefits will accrue mainly to them and not to their competitors in other cities.

I argue that the answer lies in the changing industrial makeup of U.S. localities over the 20th c. Gone are the days of the “industry town”—instead, the average U.S. county is home to a more diverse range of industries than ever before.

Nice! Would be cool to contrast with the rise of executive intl agreements (see eg scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scho...)