Research
My research studies how institutions, infrastructure, and human capital shaped long-run development, with a primary focus on nineteenth-century France. I am particularly interested in the spatial unevenness of structural change: why the same shocks that integrated rural areas into national markets, schooling, language, and politics produced convergence in some places while reshaping the spatial distribution of population, economic activity, and political mobilisation in others. Empirically, I build original historical datasets from archival, textual, administrative, and geospatial sources, combining quasi-experimental designs with GIS, OCR, computer vision, and reproducible workflows.
Doctoral Project
Diffusion and Divergence: Railways, Schools, and the Modernisation of Rural France
Economic History Political Economy Spatial & Regional Economics
This project asks how the joint diffusion of railroads and mass primary education over the nineteenth century reorganized the spatial distribution of economic activity and political integration in rural France. I treat both as linked modernisation shocks that lowered internal trade costs and raised the stock of human capital, and that interacted with prior regional structure to reshape the allocation of population, industry, and political mobilisation across space. The central question is why these shocks produced catch-up, agglomeration, and national political integration in some places, while accelerating out-migration, industrial decline, and the restructuring of rural manufacturing in others.
- Railways, Schools, and the Making of France Studies whether railway expansion produced linguistic integration and political mobilisation, and how railway access interacted with primary schooling.
- Education and the Restructuring of Rural Industry Extends my master’s thesis by asking whether the Guizot Law’s schooling shock raised local human-capital stocks or reallocated newly educated workers toward industrializing centers.
- Railways, Market Access, and Competition Connects the market-access and trade-shock literatures to study under what conditions railway integration generated expansion, restructuring, or decline in agriculture and rural industry.
Master’s Thesis
“Enrichissez-vous!”: Education, Suffrage, and Local Development in July Monarchy France
Master’s Thesis · Sciences Po · 2025 Sciences Po Prize for Best Master’s Thesis (2024-2025)
Jury: Roberto Galbiati, Emeric Henry (supervisors), Kevin O’Rourke
This paper studies how primary schooling and municipal suffrage shaped local development in July Monarchy France. I combine the 1831 Municipal Law and the 1833 Guizot Law with an arrondissement-level dataset covering 1830-1865. Pre-reform male primary education is positively associated with industrial wages in the 1840s, but I find no robust independent or interactive effect of municipal suffrage and no statistically significant medium-run wage effect of policy-induced schooling expansion. The paper also shows that threshold-based designs in this setting face historically informative identification challenges because commune-size distributions are spatially structured and correlated with prior development.
Predoctoral Research
As a predoctoral fellow at UZH under Hans-Joachim Voth, I contribute to the following projects.
For details on additional research assistance and replication experience, feel free to consult my Resume.
Selected Sample Work
A selection of assignments from my graduate coursework. Browse the full Sample Work page for more.
- Railroads, Market Access, and Urban Fringe Dynamics: Extensions to Donaldson & Hornbeck (2016) This proposal, a precursor to the market-access component of my doctoral project, outlines extensions to the Donaldson-Hornbeck framework: one incorporating dynamic spatial adjustment and urban fringe land-use equilibria, and one adapting the approach to nineteenth-century France using railway maps, agricultural inquiries, and historical census data. [PDF]
- Primary Schooling and Crime in 19th-Century France: A Cohort-Based Identification Strategy Proposes a causal identification strategy for the effect of the 1833 Guizot Law on adult crime using cohort exposure as an instrument for literacy, estimated in a panel fixed-effects framework with nineteenth-century administrative data. [PDF]
- Replication of Monge-Naranjo, Sanchez & Santaeulalia-Llopis (2019) Full Julia replication package for “Natural Resources and Global Misallocation” (AEJ: Macroeconomics), reconstructed from scratch. The full replication package, documentation, and reproducible workflow are available here.