Christopher Paik is an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, New York University Abu Dhabi. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate (2010-12) at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Economics from Stanford University, his MA in Economics from the University of Toronto, and his Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of British Columbia. His primary research interests are in the long-run determinants of economic growth, the sources of enduring cultural differences, and the application of geo-spatial information and statistics to the study of politics and economics.