Research

Historical anti-fascism and right-wing voting in Italy  (with L. Panza, E. Swee and G. Zanella)  - Journal of Economic History, Forthcoming

Abstract. We study how the experience of anti-fascism during Mussolini's dictatorship affects post-war political preferences for right-wing parties. Using newly-digitized historical data, we construct a measure of anti-fascism from the universe of regime opponents recorded in the Casellario Politico Centrale, and an instrumental variable that leverages the random assignment of judges of the Tribunale speciale per la difesa dello Stato and that resolves the simultaneity between the supply of opposition and the demand for repression of opponents. We find that stronger opposition to fascism before and during WWII weakens the support for the post-fascist party in democratic elections by between 0.3 and 1.2 percentage points. Weaker effects are detected for post-1992 conservative right-wing parties not directly tied to the Partito Nazionale Fascista. [Vox article] [Paper]

Winning Stomachs and Minds: Ethnic Restaurants and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment in the US  (with Dean Hoi ) 

Abstract. This paper examines how ethnic restaurants influence mainstream sentiment towards the immigrant groups. Leveraging one of the first restaurant booms in the US, the ‘chop suey craze’ of the early twentieth century, we investigate how the spread of Chinese restaurants impacted local attitudes towards Chinese immigrants during a period of intense anti-Chinese sentiment. Using historical press data to measure local sentiment and exploiting variation in the timing of Chinese restaurant openings, we find restaurants had a large and persistent positive effect on attitudes towards Chinese immigrants. The opening of Chinese laundries, on the other hand, had no significant impact on local sentiment, despite similar interaction and labor market competition with the US-born community as restaurants. We instead provide evidence in favor of a ‘cultural bridging’ mechanism whereby restaurants helped to reduce the socio-cultural distance of the Chinese-American community.

Tastes of Development: How Food Reveals Europe’s Cultural and Economic Transformation (With Shivram Viswanathan) 

Abstract. This paper introduces historical culinary practices as novel cultural indicators of long-run economic development. Drawing on a novel dataset I constructed comprising over 250,000 historical recipes from European cookbooks (1450-1950), I examine the relationship between urban population size and culinary elaboration across cities. The results reveal systematic regional variation: Mediterranean countries exhibit a stronger positive correlation between population and culinary complexity than their Northern counterparts. This pattern suggests that cultural institutions and elite consumption norms shaped how economic scale translated into dietary sophistication. Regions re- sponded to the pressures and opportunities of structural change in different ways, leaving cultural imprints that remain visible in European cuisines today. These findings highlight that structural transformation is not only economic but also cultural, and that food practices offer a path-dependent lens for studying historical development trajectories

Forged in Uniform: Napoleonic Conscription and the Foundations of the Italian State (with  Chun Chee Kok)

Data collection ongoing