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.
“Lexitarian Population Ethics: A Position-Based Axiomatic Approach” with Itzhak Gilboa and Larry Samuelson Abstract
The paper makes three contributions to the preference aggregation and population ethics literatures. First, we propose the "lexitarian" criterion, according to which the social planner maximizes a vector of lexicographically-ranked utilitarian functions. Second, we suggest modeling the social choice problem using "positions" as a primitive, and axiomatize the lexitarian rule in this context. Third, we argue for an interpretation of the model in terms of the impersonal approach, while prioritizing needs over wants.
Work in Progress
“The Evolving Credibility of Stories”
“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.