Hi! I’m Etienne Compérat, a Pre-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Hans-Joachim Voth. Welcome to my website! 1
Affiliations
Pre-doctoral Fellow in Economics
Replicator, Journal of Political Economy
Education
MRes in Economics
Exchange - Dept. of Agricultural & Resource Economics
B.A. in Economics and Political Sciences
Research Interests:
Political Economy, Economic History, Urban/Regional Economics
I recently completed a Research Master’s in Economics at Sciences Po, following an exchange year at UC Berkeley, where I specialized in Environmental Economics and Policy. My master’s thesis, supervised by Emeric Henry and Roberto Galbiati, examined the joint impact of education and local democratic institutions on economic development in nineteenth-century France and was awarded Sciences Po’s Prize for Best Master’s Thesis (2024-2025).
My research interests lie at the intersection of Economic History, Political Economy, and Urban & Regional Economics, with an emphasis on institutions and long-run development. Empirically, I am particularly interested in constructing new historical datasets from archival sources, combining original data collection with modern empirical methods, including OCR and machine learning tools for large-scale data extraction.
More broadly, I am interested in exploiting historical institutional and spatial variation for causal inference, with a primary focus on nineteenth-century France and Europe. During my pre-doctoral fellowship, my goal is to refine my PhD project while strengthening my empirical and computationals skills. My work involves large historical datasets and the use of Python, Stata, as well as the application of machine learning tools to economic history. In parallel, I am also part of the JPE replication team at UChicago, under the supervision of Florian Oswald.