PhD Project:
My PhD project comprises four chapters:
Job Market Paper: "The Hidden Great Levelling: Subsistence, Growth and Surplus Distribution". World Inequality Lab Working Paper (forthcoming), Paris School of Economics.
Abstract: This paper reveals a global Great Levelling, invisible in standard top income shares. The top 1% share of national income was 18% in 1820 and is 18% today, suggesting that elite power over resources has barely changed. Yet 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 needed to survive. I factor this subsistence constraint into inequality measurement and study how the surplus, income above subsistence and therefore transferable, is distributed across 48 countries over two centuries. The top 1% share of national surplus fell from 53% in 1820 to 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. Yet actual top income shares did not rise over the long run: the new surplus generated by growth accrued mainly to the 99%. Case studies of the US under Jim Crow, colonial India and low-income nations today also show that unremarkable top income shares can hide elites holding most of a limited surplus
*This paper was previously circulated as "The Long March Towards Equality: Theory and Evidence from Surplus Distribution".
Where is the Equalising State? War-Led State Capacity and the North–South Inequality Divide.
This paper asks 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 (Esade): 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 series will be incorporated into the World Inequality Database as its post-tax, post-transfer series for this period.
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. Yet, 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 have had decades of democratic rule. Alongside democracy, war-led state capacity emerges as a fundamental pillar of equality.
Underlying data: with Vicente Corral (Esade), “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 Legal Pillars of Shared Prosperity (With Nick Peyton).
This paper asks whether de jure rules matter for development. Most research on institutions focuses on de facto outcomes, such as whether leaders uphold the rule of law, while paying less attention to the differences in the laws themselves across countries and over time. With Nick Peyton (Oxford), we have coded constitutional texts for 180 countries from 1783 to 2023. We distinguish vertical checks embedded in electoral design from horizontal checks on executive power to separate liberal from illiberal democracies and trace transitions between them. We also identify a new category, ``constrained autocracy'', exemplified by post-1982 China and post-1992 Vietnam. Neither has competitive elections, yet both have institutionalised party-based constraints on executive authority. The next step is to examine how these institutional dimensions relate to development and inequality. We plan to use event studies around constitutional reforms, distinguishing changes in executive constraints from broader political transitions between autocracy and democracy.
-The Fabric of Inequality in the Developing World: Property, Markets, or Redistribution?
This paper studies why Latin America, Africa and Asia remain more unequal than Western Europe and its offshoots (the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The literature points to the persistence of "extractive" institutions since colonialism (Engerman and Sokoloff 1994, Acemoglu et al. 2001), but the specific channel through which they raise inequality remains open. Using survey data from the LIS, ECLAC and CEQ for 100 countries, I decompose inequality into property access, market income and redistribution. The gap lies mainly in redistribution. I interpret this in terms of weak state capacity, through both fiscal and labour-market channels. Limited direct taxation constrains social protection and public goods, while high informality leaves many workers outside social safety nets during working age and with limited pensions in their old age. Informality also leaves workers beyond the reach of labour laws, such as minimum wages. I also assemble colonial-census data on European settlement to examine how institutional legacies relate to these differences.