This paper examines how public research and development shaped the direction of technological change during the Cold War–era Space Race and its consequences for US manufacturing. While prior research has documented the effects of public R&D on innovation and economic growth, less is known about whether mission-oriented public investment directed innovation toward automation and how this affected labor markets. We exploit variation in exposure to NASA’s Space Race investments across industries and locations to estimate the effects of public R&D on innovation and manufacturing outcomes from 1947 to 1992. Combining newly developed measures of automation in full-text patent data with historical evidence on government involvement in patenting, we show that NASA-sponsored patents are systematically more automation-intensive than non-NASA patents within the same technological classes. Industries and locations more exposed to Space Race activity experienced persistent declines in labor share, consistent with the diffusion of labor-saving technologies developed for space applications. In contrast, we find little evidence of systematic changes in skill composition. These findings show that mission-oriented public R&D can shape the direction of technological change and have lasting distributional consequences.

This paper examines how exposure to gendered work norms impacts female labor force participation by exploiting migration as a source of variation in norms. I use novel global census data of 1.8 million migrants from 75 countries to test whether female labor market outcomes are driven by assimilation to destination norms or persistence of origin norms. I employ a fixed-effects model on movers who made the same move- from the same origin to the same destination, but differ only in the duration of exposure to destination because they moved at different ages. I find asymmetric assimilation effects under key assumptions: movements from restrictive to female-supportive gendered work norms lead to an increase in female labor force participation over time, consistent with assimilation. However, moving to a country with restrictive gendered norms does not reduce female labor force participation, suggesting persistence of origin norms. In contrast, male labor force participation remains unchanged due to variation in norms. The results are robust to alternative specifications in my study: samples of forced migrants in conflicts and married females to eliminate any potential selection bias in migration decisions.