About

Samuel Bazzi is a Professor of Economics in the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Department of Economics at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is also a co-editor at the Journal of Development Economics. His recent work explores the nation-building process in diverse societies, migration and cultural change, and the political economy of religion. He has a particular interest in how individuals and states adapt to the challenges of diversity, with complementary work in the United States and Indonesia.

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Replication package for: The Confederate Diaspora

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-16

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This replication package facilitates the creation of all the tables and figures in the paper "The Confederate Diaspora" by Bazzi, Ferrara, Fiszbein, Pearson, and Testa, using data from multiple sources (see README for details) and Stata code.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Package for Information, Intermediaries, and International Migration

  Open MIND · 2026-02-18

  dataset

  # Replication Package for "Information, Intermediaries, and International Migration" ## Authors - Samuel Bazzi (UC San Diego, NBER, and CEPR)- Lisa Cameron (University of Melbourne)- Simone Schaner (University of Southern California, NBER)- Firman Witoelar (Australian National University) ## Overview This replication package contains the data and code necessary to reproduce all tables and figures in "Information, Intermediaries, and International Migration" published in the *Journal of the European Economic Association*. See enclosed README for details.

  DOI

• Replication Package for Information, Intermediaries, and International Migration

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-18

  datasetOpen access

  # Replication Package for "Information, Intermediaries, and International Migration" ## Authors - Samuel Bazzi (UC San Diego, NBER, and CEPR)- Lisa Cameron (University of Melbourne)- Simone Schaner (University of Southern California, NBER)- Firman Witoelar (Australian National University) ## Overview This replication package contains the data and code necessary to reproduce all tables and figures in "Information, Intermediaries, and International Migration" published in the *Journal of the European Economic Association*. See enclosed README for details.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: The Confederate Diaspora

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-16

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This replication package facilitates the creation of all the tables and figures in the paper "The Confederate Diaspora" by Bazzi, Ferrara, Fiszbein, Pearson, and Testa, using data from multiple sources (see README for details) and Stata code.

  PublisherDOI

• When Do Migrants Shape Culture?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontier History and Gender Norms in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• It Takes a Village Election: Turnover and Performance in Local Bureaucracies

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-02-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In many countries, local governments struggle with inefficiency and corruption, often perpetuated by entrenched elites.This paper explores how leadership changes affect local bureaucratic performance.Combining personnel and citizen surveys with a regression discontinuity design in a large sample of Indonesian villages, we show that turnovers in village elections revitalize local bureaucracies, disrupt nepotistic networks, and improve local government performance.Bureaucrats serving new leaders are more engaged and less likely to be tied to past or present village officials, resulting in a more responsive bureaucracy that interacts more with citizens and better understands their needs.This improves public service provision, measured in both administrative data and citizen surveys.Overall, our results show that leadership changes can mitigate elite capture and improve governance at the grassroots level.

  PublisherDOI

• How to Build a Diverse Nation: Lessons from the Indonesian Experience

  Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies · 2025-09-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When Do Migrants Shape Culture?

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-07-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the impacts of migrants on the culture of their destinations.Migrants often assimilate to local social norms and practices, but they also tend to maintain their own culture.Sometimes, beyond preserving their culture, they influence their new neighbors.We propose a conceptual framework to understand when migrants shape culture at their destination-and how.We identify two key conditions for influence (ideological intensity and power structure) and three channels of influence (cultural spillovers, organizational mobilization, and political leverage).We combine insights from political economy, social psychology, and evolutionary approaches to illuminate pathways of influence in historical perspective.Our review offers a new perspective on the mechanisms of cultural transmission, using illustrative cases to characterize the various ways in which migrants shape culture in their destinations.

  PublisherDOI

• Religion, Education, and the State

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-08-05 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper explores how state and religious providers of education compete during the nation building process. Using novel administrative data, we characterize the evolution of Indonesia’s Islamic education system and religious school choice after the introduction of mass public primary schooling in the 1970s. Funded through informal taxation, Islamic schools competed with the state by entering in the same markets. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased overall as Islamic schools absorbed growing demand for secondary education. In the short run, electoral support for the secular regime weakened in markets with greater public school construction. Over the long run, Islamic schools established at this juncture are more differentiated in terms of religious curriculum, and cohorts exposed to mass public schooling as children are more invested in religion than in the national identity. Our findings offer a new perspective on the political economy of education reforms and the emergence of parallel systems of public goods provision.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Unity in Diversity? Migration, Culture and National Development

  NSF · $519k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew Gudgeon

  60 shared

• Richard M. Peck

  54 shared

• Oeindrila Dube

  University of Chicago

  54 shared

• Christopher Blattman

  University of Chicago

  51 shared

• Robert Blair

  University of Chicago

  49 shared

• Alexander D. Rothenberg

  22 shared

• Lisa Cameron

  20 shared

• Martín Fiszbein

  Boston University

  18 shared

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2020