Environmental Catastrophe and the Direction of Invention: Evidence from the American Dust Bowl

I thank Daron Acemoglu, David Atkin, Pierre Azoulay, Isadora Frankenthal, Claudia Goldin, Daniel Gross, Richard Hornbeck, Joshua Lev Krieger, Josh Lerner, Petra Moser, Nathan Nunn, Ben Olken, James A. Robinson, Karthik Sastry, and Andrei Shleifer for advice and comments. I thank seminar participants at Harvard, HBS, MIT, the NBER Summer Institute Energy and Environmental Economics session, and the NBER Summer Institute Development of the American Economy session for helpful feedback. I am grateful to Jewell Little, JoAnna Gorsage, and Stephen Malone at USDA AMS for assistance compiling the Variety Name List in compliance with the FOIA request. I am also grateful to Pierre Azoulay, Chris Ataide, and Timothy Otto for their support with acquiring the Web of Science data and to Alex Whalley for sharing data on crop experiments at US agricultural experiment stations. Rada Pavlova and Marina Zhang provided outstanding research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.