Hi! I’m Etienne Compérat, a PhD student in Economics at Sciences Po. Welcome to my website! 1
Affiliations
PhD in Economics
Replicator, Journal of Political Economy
Education
Predoctoral Fellow in Economics
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 institutions, infrastructure, and human capital jointly shape development, with a particular focus on the spatial unevenness of structural change. My doctoral project, “Diffusion and Divergence: Railways, Schools, and the Modernisation of Rural France,” studies how railway expansion and mass primary education integrated rural areas into national markets, institutions, and language while reshaping the spatial distribution of population, economic activity, and political mobilisation.
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 role of primary schooling and municipal suffrage in shaping local development under the July Monarchy, and was awarded Sciences Po’s Prize for Best Master’s Thesis (2024-2025). Further details on both projects are on my Research page.
Across these projects and my predoctoral work, I contribute to building historical datasets from archival, textual, administrative, and geospatial sources, combining quasi-experimental designs with GIS, OCR, computer vision, and reproducible workflows. In parallel, I am part of the JPE replication team under the supervision of Florian Oswald.