WORKING PAPERS

[Political Change and Artistic Innovation: Evidence from Two Centuries  of Painting]. [Last version: October 2026]

Abstract: How do political institutions shape the evolution of creative production? I study this question in painting, where the content of new work can be compared across two centuries of political regimes. Using computer- vision representations of 149,410 dated paintings, I measure a work’s innovation as its similarity to subsequent production relative to its similarity to the preceding two decades. In a country–year panel for 1801–2002 that separates electoral democracy into its components, freedom of expression and access to alternative information is the only component followed by a precisely estimated change in innovation, and the response is asymmetric. Large contractions are followed by a decline of about 0.2 standard deviations, which persists when the comparison works exclude the country’s own region and occurs within artists who keep painting; wars without such contractions leave innovation unchanged. Large expansions are followed by a smaller and imprecise increase that operates through the composition of active artists. Europe’s postwar division, imposed by military and diplomatic events and affecting the whole institutional package, was followed by a larger divergence of the same sign.

[Farewell, Mr. Brazil: Constitutional Failure and Parliamentary Conflict in the Portuguese Revolutionary Cortes (1821–22)]. [with Thales Zamberlan] [Last Version: April 2026]

Abstract: Why do constitutional projects fail? This paper studies the Portuguese Revolutionary Cortes of 1821-22, the transatlantic assembly that sought to reorganise the Portuguese empire through a common constitution but instead helped produce Brazilian independence. Using 15,008 attributed speeches, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and local event-study regressions around the staggered arrival of Brazilian delegations, we show that the crisis was not organised around a single Portugal-Brazil cleavage. Internal divisions among Brazilian provinces were often as important as the aggregate imperial divide, while fiscal, military, and administrative issues repeatedly hardened debate. The arrival of each delegation altered the coalition that would have had to sustain the constitutional bargain. The case shows how fiscal disarray and provincial heterogeneity can turn constitution-making into constitutional failure.

[From Scripture to Schoolhouse: Gender Norms, Literacy, and Cultural Change in the Long Run]. [Last Version: April 2026]

Abstract: This paper studies the long-run evolution of gender norms in Brazil and the United States using historical newspaper discourse from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I construct a Bible-anchored Gender Traditional Score (GTS) by embedding newspaper passages alongside gender-relevant Biblical texts, creating a comparable measure of traditional gender discourse across languages, countries, and time. The results show that gender traditionalism declines in both countries, but Brazil remains substantially more traditional than the United States for much of the period. Educational expansion is the main observable correlate of cross-country convergence, accounting for nearly half of the Brazil-U.S. gap. Within Brazil, literacy and fertility also shape the male-female discursive divide. Overall, the evidence suggests that gender norms are persistent but move with slow-changing educational and demographic transitions.