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 is 18% in both 1820 and 2020. This suggests persistent elite control over resources. However, in poorer eras —as in poor nations today— most of national income is tied to subsistence and cannot be transferred to elites. This paper factors in subsistence constraints and documents a long-run trend towards equality in the distribution of surplus: income net of subsistence. I introduce the Surplus Distribution Framework (SDF), defining a subsistence floor and deriving the Maximum Income Concentration (MIC): the upper bound on the top 1% share. The MIC expands with growth: as income above the subsistence floor rises, so does the space for income concentration. Using historical country data, I document that even canonical extractive cases —slave colonies, Tsarist Russia— have top shares that cluster near, but not above, their MIC. The floor binds. Using subnational data, I show that former US slave states during Jim Crow have lower top shares of income than non-slave states but higher surplus shares once state subsistence floors are factored in. The SDF recovers underlying elite control over transferable resources. Using long-run panel data (1820-2020), I find a global Great Levelling: while the world average top 1% income share has stayed at 18%, their surplus share fell from 53% in 1820 to 19% today. The bottom 50% is the main winner, rising from below 1% of surplus in 1820, near subsistence, to 13% today; a quarter of this gain is driven by the post-1920s rise of progressive taxes and transfers. Households’ capacity to meet goals beyond mere subsistence has been substantially equalised.
-Democracy, War-Led State Capacity, and Redistribution. This project examines the divergence in income inequality between the so-called Global South and the Global North through institutional capacity to tax citizens and provide public goods. Building on the first long-run post-tax and post-transfer income inequality estimates for a panel of countries from 1820 to 1980, it argues that state capacity — rooted in the mass mobilisation and mass taxation of wartime — mediates the relationship between democracy and lower inequality, notably through greater redistribution (mass income taxation, low informality, and universal provision of public goods).
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.
-Constitutions and Shared Prosperity. This project studies how different political systems — various types of autocracy and democracy — shape economic outcomes. It introduces the first de jure measure of institutional “checks and balances,” coding 240 years of constitutional history (1783–2023) across 180 countries. It identifies a new category of “constrained” autocracies, which, even without free elections and an independent judiciary, have institutionalised party-based (“collective”) horizontal checks on the executive, as in Singapore, post-1982 China, and post-1992 Vietnam. These regimes operate in similar ways to liberal democracies in terms of credible commitments and investment. However, while they managed to deliver sustainable economic growth, they failed to provide lower inequality.
-Colonial Legacies and Long-Run Inequality. Revisiting the "colonial origins" literature (Engerman and Sokoloff 1993, Acemoglu et al. 2001), this 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.