Research

This paper asks whether giving women the right to vote changed how much societies invested in daughters' health. Using a gender height-gap measure across 187 countries and eleven decades (1890–1990), it finds that the gap between men's and women's height narrowed after countries granted women's suffrage—consistent with either governments responding to female voters, or women gaining more say over household resources once enfranchised. 

Using skeletal data from over 2,200 individuals spanning almost two thousand years, this paper builds the first continuous record of inequality in biological welfare for Italy. Inequality was relatively high under the Roman Empire, fell sharply amid the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, stayed low through the early medieval plague era, then rose again in the late medieval and early modern periods. The paper connects these swings to labor supply relative to land, linking Italy's long-run inequality history to a broader theory of land- versus labor-limited economies.

This paper shows that human height can serve as a reliable stand-in for real wages across historical periods and regions where wage records don't exist. By combining wage data with anthropometric evidence from archaeological and archival sources, it produces long-run real-wage estimates for China and the United Kingdom going back 2,500 years, the first time this has been done at this scale. Our evidence suggests that the Great Divergence between East and West began earlier than most existing estimates place it, already in the first half of the second millennium CE.

This paper tracks the numerical sophistication of ruling elites across Asia over thirteen centuries, using the share of rulers whose birth year was recorded in historical chronologies as a proxy — recording that information required real numerical skill from the bureaucracy around a ruler. Covering over 16,500 rulers across 33 present-day countries, it finds that East Asia led early but declined after the 11th century, while South, Southeast, and Central Asia show very different trajectories. Exposure to nomadic invasion is linked to a roughly 50% drop in elite numeracy — whether or not the invasion ended in conquest — pointing to a shift toward military values under sustained external pressure. 

This paper asks how the relationship between women and men changed when the world's first cities emerged in ancient Mesopotamia. To measure this, we use linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH)—grooves that form on children's teeth during episodes of childhood malnutrition or illness—comparing its prevalence in girls' versus boys' teeth across more than 560 skeletons to infer who received better care in early life. Gender inequality was low before urbanization, then surged with the rise of the first large cities and centralized granaries in the Chalcolithic period, eased again during the Bronze Age, and widened once more by the Iron Age.

This paper studies market integration in China's silver-based monetary system during the 1920s–30s, comparing its response to railway closures and civil war with its response to Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Financial integration between cities held up under wartime disruptions to transport, but weakened once the invasion began to detach the Northeast from China's monetary area — suggesting that changes to monetary authority may matter more for market integration than disruption to physical infrastructure.