You Reap What You Know: Origins and Dynamics of State Capacity Geography provided some states with better ability to tax their subjects than others. To test this idea empirically, we propose a geographic index of information costs, caloric observability, to understand if a more complicated geography prohibited states to tax...

Community Origins of Industrial Entrepreneurship: Evidence from India We argue that community networks played an important role in the emergence of Indian entrepreneurship in the cotton textile industry during the 19th century, overcoming the lack of market institutions and government support. From business registers we construct a new panel data...

The Persistent Effect of Gender Division of Labour: African American Women After Slavery, Anna Baiardi “This paper explores the role of historical gender division of labour in shaping gender norms. To answer this question, I analyse whether differences in the gender division of labour during slavery in the United States...

The time varying risk puzzle, Dmitry Kuvshinov “Do risk premiums on financial assets vary over time, and which factors explain this variation? I study these two questions using a new dataset on historical ex ante risk premiums on three major risky asset classes – equity, housing and corporate bonds –...

The Big Bang, joint with Dmitry Kuvshinov This paper presents for the first time annual stock market capitalization data for 17 advanced economies from 1870 to today. We show that long-run trends and fluctuations over the last 150 years are eclipsed by a more recent observation. Market capitalization relative to...

Tordesillas, Slavery and the Origins of Brazilian Inequality, joint with Thomas Fujiwara and Humberto Laudares This article studies the long-term impact of slavery on economic inequality at the receiving end of the spectrum. We focus on Brazil, one of the largest slave importers and the last country to abolish this...

The Sense of the State According to a growing literature in economics, mafia-type organizations are a response to weak states. In several contexts, however, these organizations continue to persist and thrive even when state capacity is strengthened. This suggests that the perception of a weak and remote state may be,...