About

Martin Fiszbein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Boston University. His academic fields include Economic Growth and Development, Economic History, and Urban Economics. He holds a PhD from Brown University. His office is located in SSW 524, and his contact email is fiszbein@bu.edu. Further details about his research focus, background, and key contributions are not provided on the page.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Economics
• Economic geography
• Law
• Development economics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of “Rugged Individualism” in the United States

  Econometrica · 2020 · 283 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Economic geography

  The presence of a westward‐moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the “frontier thesis” and identify its long‐run implications for culture and politics. We track the frontier throughout the 1790–1890 period and construct a novel, county‐level measure of total frontier experience (TFE). Historically, frontier locations had distinctive demographics and greater individualism. Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive individualism and opposition to redistribution. This pattern cuts across known divides in the United States, including urban–rural and north–south. We provide evidence on the roots of frontier culture, identifying both selective migration and a causal effect of frontier exposure on individualism. Overall, our findings shed new light on the frontier's persistent legacy of rugged individualism.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Samuel Bazzi

  18 shared

• Nicolás Ajzenman

  IZA - Institute of Labor Economics

  16 shared

• Daron Acemoğlu

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  16 shared

• Cevat Giray Aksoy

  University College London

  15 shared

• Carlos Molina

  8 shared

• Federico Droller

  6 shared

• Andreas Ferrara

  6 shared

• Patrick Testa

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Brown University

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