Democratic Support for the Bolshevik Revolution: An Empirical Investigation of 1917 Constituent Assembly Elections Scholars have long-debated the causes of popular support for the Russian Revolution and how this support translated into successful regime change. We systematically investigate cross-district and cross-city variation in popular support for the Bolsheviks using voting...

Was Domar Right? Serfdom and Factor Endowments in Bohemia. Joint with Alexander Klein and Jeremy Edwards. Are institutions shaped by factor endowments? Labor-coercion institutions such as serfdom and slavery, which profoundly restricted economic growth, were ascribed by Domar to high land-labor ratios. But historical evidence appeared to refute this hypothesis. We...

Intergenerational Mobility in China across Space and Time Inequality is an important issue in many countries, and intergenerational mobility is one of the key mechanisms for alleviating inequality. What drives mobility? Why do some areas generate higher rates of mobility than others? This paper has two objectives. First, using individual...

Inheritances and the concentration of personal wealth in Italy from Unification to the Great War (1862-1915) In this paper, we estimate new series of wealth concentration for Italy during the so-called first globalisation, a time when inequality reached secular peaks in advanced economies, while Italy enjoyed a ‘benevolent’ industrial take-off....

The Persistence of the Criminal Justice Gender Gap: Evidence from 200 Years of Judicial Decisions We document persistent gender gaps favoring females in jury convictions and judge sentences in nearly 200 years of London trials, which are unexplained by case characteristics. We find that three sharp changes in punishment severity...

Inequality and Redistribution in France, 1900-2018: Evidence from Post-Tax Distributional National Accounts This paper presents post-tax Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for France. That is, we combine national accounts, tax and survey data in a comprehensive and consistent manner to build homogenous annual series on the post-tax, post-transfer distribution of national...

Technology Adoption and Access to Credit via Mobile Phones. Farmers in developing countries often lack access to timely and reliable information about modern technologies that are essential to improve agricultural productivity. The recent diffusion of mobile phones has the potential to overcome these barriers by making information available to those...