Research
Working Papers
“Institutional Commitment and Economic Revival: Evidence from Palace-Building in Renaissance Rome” Abstract
I study the recovery of the Roman economy following the papacy’s absence (1309-1377), specifically, an era of palace-building resulting in the construction of over 35% of palaces built in Roman history. Using a novel dataset, I show that the late-15th-century palace-construction boom was triggered by credible institutional commitment. Two reforms allowed prelates to bequeath their possessions (1475) and reduced costs for all patrons (1480), causing a significant increase of prelate palace-building. Initial prelate investment guaranteed the papacy would remain in Rome long-term, which eventually incentivized laymen to invest. I disentangle the effect of commitment to long-term presence from contemporaneous papal presence to show that the irreversibility of institutional change is a necessary condition for successful intervention.
- Awards: Georges Gallais-Hamonno Prize in Historical Finance; Frank D. Lewis Memorial Prize; Arthur Hosios Award.
“Population Ethics: A Position-Based Axiomatic Approach” with Itzhak Gilboa Abstract
A social planner considers the far future, asking which population profile should be preferred, where none of the people involved has been born or conceived yet. A population's profile is given by the number of individuals who are in each possible position. Thus, symmetry among individuals who are in the same position is presupposed by the model. The model allows populations to be of different sizes, and assumes that they can be compared by the social planner. Three simple conditions characterize the relations that can be represented in a utilitarian way, that is, by assigning a number to each position so that profiles are ranked according to the sum of utilities across individuals.
Work in Progress
“The Evolving Credibility of Stories”
“Biases in Prospective Learning” with Yves Le Yaouanq and Peter Schwardmann
Pre-PhD Publications
“Restricted Invertibility of Continuous Matrix Functions,” with Adrian Fan, Jack Montemurro, Pavlos Motakis, Naina Praveen, Paul Skoufranis and Noam Tobin. Operators and Matrices, 2022, 16(4): 1191-1217.