Welcome to my website! 

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at Boston University. I am also affiliated with NBER, BREAD, CEPR, and J-PAL.

My research interests are in political economy and development. I am broadly interested in understanding how social, political, and cultural constraints interact with the process of economic development. One strand of my research studies democracy in developing countries and globally. I have worked in various countries including Indonesia, Kenya, Senegal, and Uganda.  Another strand explores the political economy of religion. Several of my papers take a historical perspective to study how institutions and culture have shaped the evolution of modern states.  Finally, I have also worked on the topics of urban poverty as well as religious discrimination and ethnic favoritism. I completed my PhD in Economics from MIT in 2018.

You can download my CV here, read my research papers here, and find my Google Scholar profile here.

Recent papers:

The Dynamic Consequences of State-Building: Evidence from the French Revolution (with Cédric Chambru and Emeric Henry). Conditionally accepted, American Economic Review.

Electoral Turnovers (with Vincent Pons and Vincent Rollet). Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies.

J'Accuse! Antisemitism and Financial Markets in the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (with Quoc-Anh Do, Roberto Galbiati, and Miguel Ortiz Serrano). Forthcoming, Journal of Financial Economics.

Religion, Education, and the State (with Samuel Bazzi and Masyhur Hilmy). Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies.

Eat Widely, Vote Wisely: Lessons from a Campaign Against Vote Buying in Uganda (with Chris Blattman, Horacio Larreguy, and Otis Reid). New draft.