Research
My research asks how political and educational institutions shape long-run economic development, with a primary focus on nineteenth-century France. I am particularly interested in how institutional variation at the local level (in suffrage rules, schooling access, and administrative structure) translates into differences in labour markets, industrialisation, and regional growth. Empirically, I construct original historical datasets from archival sources, combining quantitative methods with GIS, OCR, and machine learning tools for large-scale data extraction. Methodologically, I am interested in how historically persistent territorial patterns condition what can be credibly identified from policy variation, and what those patterns themselves reveal about long-run development.
Master’s Thesis
“Enrichissez-vous !”: The Effects of Primary Schooling and Political Participation on Economic Development in 19th-century 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
Abstract This paper studies the joint role of primary schooling and local democratic participation in shaping industrial development in 19th-century France. I exploit two population-threshold reforms enacted under the July Monarchy - the Municipal Law of 1831, which expanded local voting rights, and the Guizot Law of 1833, which mandated primary schools in municipalities above 500 inhabitants - using a newly assembled arrondissement-level dataset covering 1830–1865. A static OLS design finds that pre-reform male primary education is positively associated with industrial wages in the 1840s. A dynamic IV specification, instrumenting schooling changes with exposure to the Guizot threshold, detects no statistically significant medium-run wage effect. Municipal suffrage exposure shows no independent or interactive effect in either design. A central finding is methodological: because commune-size distributions are historically structured and spatially correlated with prior development, threshold-based designs in this setting face identification challenges that are themselves historically informative.
PDF under revision
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 outlines two extensions to the Donaldson-Hornbeck market-access framework: one incorporating dynamic spatial adjustment and urban fringe land-use equilibria (drawing on monocentric city theory), and one adapting the approach to 19th-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 19th-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 authors provided raw data and a single merge file but no code for tables or figures. The full replication package, documentation, and reproducible workflow are available here.