My current agenda involves projects revolving around i) investigating long-run determinants of inequality, and ii) endogenizing institutional change, in particular exploring how historical patterns of economic activity contributed to shaping institutions across space. I'm also interested in empirical identification challenges, and in new ways to acquire data allowing to tackle these challenges.
The end of slavery in Brazil: Immigration and Abolition Politics (with Arthur Silve). This version: August 2026. R&R at EJ
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, and it did so by the votes of an elite legislature drawn heavily from slave-holding districts. Assembling a new district-level panel of the thirteen roll-call votes on emancipation in Brazil's Câmara dos Deputados (1884--1888), we show that access to immigrant labor shaped the abolitionist coalition. Representatives of slavery-intensive districts voted for abolition more often when their districts also drew European immigrants, while immigration had little effect where slavery was limited. The pattern holds vote by vote, however we treat abstentions and absences, and under a shift-share instrument, consistent with free labor substituting for coerced labor.
Résistance et abolition de l'esclavage au Brésil. Revue d'Économie du Développement, 31.2 (2022): 185-190.
Slavery, political attitudes and social capital: evidence from Brazil. Journal of Historical Political Economy, Vol. 1: No. 3, pp 377-409, 2021.
Discussion on Broadstreet.
This paper investigates the long-term influence of slavery and its abolition on development, social capital and political attitudes in Brazil. I show that slavery and support for coercive institutions - measured by legislators' voting decisions on emancipation-related bills at the end of the 19th century - had a persistent negative effect on development, as measured by GDP, poverty and inequality. Focusing on social capital as a persistence mechanism, I show that the evidence is consistent with slavery and support for coercion having durably negatively affected social capital. In particular, individuals living in historically slavery-intensive municipalities with stronger support for coercive institutions exhibit lower levels of generalized trust today, and are more likely to be less supportive of democracy and to have weaker beliefs on corruption.
The end of slavery in Brazil: Escape and resistance on the road to freedom (with Arthur Silve). This version: March 2025.
Discussion on Broadstreet.
American Economic Association 2023 Meeting Webcast (timestamp 1:38).
Labor coercion is often framed as an elite choice; in nineteenth-century Brazil, we show how enslaved people’s resistance reclaimed leverage and reshaped the politics of abolition. Using roll-call votes on all abolition-related bills in Brazil’s Câmara dos Deputados (1884–1888), we study how enslaved workers' outside options affected legislative support for ending slavery. We proxy outside options with the location and scale of quilombos, durable maroon communities founded by runaways, and show that representatives from slavery-intensive districts with greater quilombo exposure were significantly more likely to support abolition.
Regulatory enforcement and monopsony power in guestworker programs: Evidence from Canada
I study the effects of regulatory enforcement on safety and labor market outcomes in a setting characterized by severe monopsony power: Canada’s agricultural guest-worker program. Seasonal workers are bound to a single employer through tied work permits, limiting their ability to escape unsafe conditions. A federal compliance regime introduced in 2016 publicly discloses non-compliant employers and sanctions them with penalties or ineligibility. Exploiting variation in the timing and location of enforcement actions, I show that enforcement significantly reduces severe safety failures, with effects concentrated in farm worker-intensive areas. Enforcement also reshapes agricultural labor markets through the exit of non-compliant employers.
Inequality of educational opportunity (2017). With Sandrine Mesplé-Somps.
Drawing on several empirical approaches to the estimation of inequality of opportunity, we build parametric and non-parametric measures of inequality of opportunity in educational attainment and achievement in four low- and middle-income countries. For each country, we study the dynamics of unequal opportunities as they unfold in the course of individuals schooling trajectories, from early childhood and into adulthood. For specific subsamples, we also evaluate the influence of school quality and school supply, treated as exogenous circumstances, on educational inequality of opportunity levels. While the magnitude of unequal opportunities varies both within and between countries, we find that from a fifth to over a third of educational inequality is attributable to morally unacceptable exogenous circumstances. Furthermore, the estimations reveal complex inequality structures within each country, and we analyse these varying patterns using both Shapley-Shorrocks and Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions.
Développement et inégalités d'accès à l'eau: Tarification des services publics en contexte de corruption endémique (2016). With Justin Leroux and Etienne Billette de Villemeur.