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 31% 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. A reform of inheritance laws (1475) allowed prelates to bequeath their possessions, 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.
Supplementary materials: Online Appendix
Awards: Georges Gallais-Hamonno Prize in Historical Finance; Frank D. Lewis Memorial Prize; Arthur Hosios Award.
Media coverage: The Conversation (French)
“Lexitarianism: A Needs-Based Approach to Public Policy” with Itzhak Gilboa and Larry Samuelson Abstract
Utilitarian models typically do not attempt to capture distinctions between various determinants of well-being: they do not distinguish between wants and needs, and they assume that all determinants of wellbeing are commensurate. In contrast, welfare policies seem to reflect these distinctions. We propose to bridge the gap between utilitarian theory and economic practice by introducing _lexitarianism_: the maximization of a vector of lexicographically-ordered welfare functions, as applied to needs. We propose a formulation of the social choice problem based on the concept of a position and use it to axiomatize lexitarianism as well as its extensions to multiple time periods and uncertainty.
Work in Progress
“Narratives and Financial Markets”
Awards: AF2I (French Association of Institutional Investors) Young Researcher Grant
“Prospective and Retrospective Valuation of Financial Information” 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.