PhD Project:
My PhD project comprises four chapters:
Job Market Paper: The Long March Towards Equality: Theory and Evidence from Surplus Distribution — World Inequality Lab Working Paper (Forthcoming), Paris School of Economics. For now, available on request.
Abstract: The world average top 1% share of national income was 18% in 1820, 20% in 1920, and is 18% today. The literature reads this as evidence that elite power over resources has been resilient to historical change: the rise of organised labour, democratisation, and decolonisation. This paper reveals a Great Levelling, a pattern that aligns better with these radical transformations. In poorer times, much of national income was tied to subsistence. Transferring this income to the top 1% would leave the other 99% below what they need to survive. I factor this subsistence constraint into inequality measurement and study how the surplus —income above subsistence and therefore transferable— is distributed. Doing so shows that the world average top 1% share of national surplus fell from 53% in 1820 to 40% in 1920 and 19% today, a 2.8-fold decline in elite control over transferable resources. Growth, by lifting incomes above subsistence, expanded the share of income that could accrue to the top 1%, from 38% in 1820 to 90% today. Yet actual top income shares have not risen: the surplus that growth liberated accrued mainly to the 99%. Case studies point to the same reversal: top income shares, paradoxically, make former US slave states under Jim Crow appear more equal than non-slave states, colonial India as equal as democratic India, and lowincome nations as equal as high-income ones today. In all three, elites control most of a limited surplus while exhibiting an unremarkable top income share.
-The Missing Equalising State: War-Led State Capacity and the North–South Inequality Divide. I ask why the Global South —Asia, Latin America, and Africa— remains more unequal than the Global North: Europe and its offshoots (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The paper introduces a new dataset built with Vicente Corral: the first long-run global series of post-tax, post-transfer income inequality for 1820–1980, assembled from tax-introduction dates, long-run fiscal aggregates, and modern incidence estimates. This makes it possible to measure redistribution before 1980 beyond the handful of countries for which estimates exist. The World Inequality Lab will incorporate the series into the World Inequality Database as its post-tax series for this period, documented in a forthcoming Technical Note.
Using this novel dataset, this paper argues that state capacity, rooted in the mass taxation achieved during wartime, is what mediates the relation between democracy and low inequality. Where state capacity is weak—narrow tax bases, high informality—democracies fail to translate voter demands into redistribution, as in much of Latin America and India, where public goods remain limited in both coverage and level. High-capacity autocracies, like China, offer growth but not equality, as social demands are muted; low-capacity autocracies deliver neither. In the North, democracy with strong state capacity delivers high redistribution: a 30% reduction in the Gini, compared with 7% in the Global South. This is not a development or democratisation gap: much of the Global South today is as rich as Western Europe was during its peak equality years in the 1960-70s, while India and most of Latin America remain highly unequal after decades of democratic rule. Alongside democracy, war-led state capacity emerges as a fundamental pillar of equality.
Underlying data: with V. Corral, “Long-Run Post-Tax, Post-Transfer Income Inequality 1820-1980: The First Country- and Policy-Specific Estimation”. World Inequality Lab Technical Notes (Forthcoming), PSE.
-The Constitutional Pillars of Shared Prosperity (With Nick Peyton). This project studies how de jure
institutions shape long-run development and inequality. Most research on institutions focuses on de facto
outcomes, such as whether leaders uphold the rule of law or protect property rights, while paying less attention to the legal rules that structure politics and distribute power. We address this gap by coding 240 years of constitutional texts, from 1783 to 2023, across 180 countries, covering 20 constitutional powers and rights. This provides the first systematic long-run de jure analysis of political systems.
We use these new data to distinguish vertical checks embedded in electoral design from horizontal checks on executive power, allowing us to separate liberal from illiberal democracies and trace transitions between them, as in Turkey under Erdogan or Hungary under Orban. This speaks directly to debates on democratic erosion, which increasingly proceeds through the gradual weakening of executive constraints rather than through outright coups. We also identify a new category, “constrained autocracy,” exemplified by Singapore and China. Neither has competitive elections, yet both have institutionalised party-based constraints on executive authority. The coding is complete. To estimate how constitutional regimes shape development and inequality, we will exploit episodes of abrupt constitutional change in an event-study design, e.g., the 1947 liberal constitution imposed on Japan under US occupation.
-Colonial Legacies and Inequality in the Global South. Revisiting the "colonial origins" literature (Engerman and Sokoloff 1993, Acemoglu et al. 2001), this older project explores how colonial institutions continue to shape inequality. Using new historical data —including colonial censuses from over 100 countries— and a novel instrumental variable strategy exploiting historical variation in the conditions faced by colonisers —the types of climates and the presence of pre-colonial states—, it aims to better identify the causal mechanisms going from colonial rule to post-colonial institutions and present-day inequality levels. It also disentangles pre- and post-redistribution inequality channels to assess what specific institutions matter most for inequality.