Hi! I’m Etienne Compérat, a predoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Hans-Joachim Voth. Welcome to my website! 1
Affiliations
Predoctoral Fellow in Economics
Replicator, Journal of Political Economy
Education
M.Res. in Economics
Exchange - Dept. of Agricultural & Resource Economics
B.A. in Economics and Political Science
Research Interests:
Political Economy, Economic History, Spatial/Regional Economics
My research asks how modernisation reshaped the geography of development in nineteenth-century France. My doctoral project, “Diffusion and Divergence: Railways, Schools, and the Modernisation of Rural France,” studies how railway-induced market integration and mass primary education integrated rural areas into national markets, institutions, and language while also producing concentration, out-migration, and deindustrialisation in some places.
I recently completed a Research Master’s in Economics at Sciences Po. My master’s thesis, supervised by Roberto Galbiati and Emeric Henry, studied the joint effects of primary schooling and municipal suffrage under the July Monarchy on local development, and was awarded Sciences Po’s Prize for Best Master’s Thesis (2024-2025).
Empirically, I construct historical datasets from archival, textual, administrative, and geospatial sources, combining GIS, OCR, computer vision, and reproducible workflows with modern causal-inference tools. During my predoctoral fellowship, I work on projects in economic history, political economy, and cultural economics, and I am also part of the JPE replication team at UChicago under the supervision of Florian Oswald.