Research

Research Proposals

The Violent Origins of Political Capture: Evidence from Romanian Collectivization
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This proposal investigates whether historical imperial divisions shaped the intensity of communist collectivization and how this state violence subsequently influenced modern political capture in Romania. I argue that the pre-1918 Habsburg border provides a geographic discontinuity to study the capacity for coercive rural expropriation. Using a border regression discontinuity design combined with newly digitized commune-level archival data on arrests and deportations, I differentiate between selective violence against wealthy peasants and arbitrary violence. I seek to demonstrate how these distinct forms of repression affected the long-run supply of rural elites and electorate demand, ultimately influencing the extent of clientelist capture by political heirs in the post-1989 era.

Capital-Intensive Technology and Local Political Control: Evidence from the Brazilian Cerrado
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This project examines how the introduction of capital-intensive agricultural technology in the Brazilian Cerrado during the 1970s transformed local political power dynamics. I hypothetize that state-subsidized, mechanized soybean cultivation disproportionately benefited existing holders of land and credit, affecting structural inequality. By exploiting spatial variation in potential soybean yields under high-input versus low-input management using agro-ecological data, I estimate the shock’s impact on agricultural land concentration. Using cross-sectional reduced-form frameworks, I test whether this technologically induced land concentration subsequently led to the entrenchment of agrarian elites, measured through the occupational shares of local office-holders, campaign finance concentration, and rural land conflict.

The Irish Lands Acts, Surname Persistence, and the Political Economy of Zoning
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The paper would investigate the long-run political economy of urban land-use regulation by tracing the intergenerational influence of property rights transfers under the historical Irish Land Acts. I propose that the idiosyncratic timing of tenant land purchases created lasting family networks that impact modern municipal zoning processes. By linking 1911 census records to contemporary planning requests through rare surnames, I construct a lineage-level panel of local political representation. Using landlord mortality before 1903 as an instrumental variable for early purchase timing, I test whether historically entrenched lineages utilize their administrative presence to broadly restrict local housing supply or to selectively capture the financial gains of targeted rezoning.

Works in Progress

Land Restitution, Asset Mismatch and Political Capture in Rural Romania
Working Paper, 2026. | Download

This paper examines how deep-rooted institutional legacies moderate regional responses to modern economic transitions. Building on the context of Romania’s 1991 agricultural decollectivization and 2007 EU accession, I analyze the persistent asset mismatch resulting from the distribution of fragmented property rights over indivisible capital. To isolate the role of historical institutions, the empirical strategy employs split-sample and synthetic difference-in-differences (SDiD) designs, evaluating the geographic penalty within the respective boundaries of the former Habsburg Empire and the Old Kingdom. The estimates suggest a distinct divergence along the 1914 border. Following EU integration, the Habsburg Plains exhibited greater structural resilience, whereas the Old Kingdom Plains demonstrated patterns consistent with entrenched political clientelism and demographic stagnation. The research suggests that historical state capacity may affect how regions absorb and adapt to geographic constraints.

Master Thesis

Land Restitution, Political Capture and the Fiscal Zombie in Rural Romania
MRes Thesis, Sciences Po, May 2026. Supervisor: Julia Cagé. | Download

This paper investigates the long-term economic and political consequences of Romania’s 1991 land restitution and its interaction with the 2007 European Union accession shock. I argue that restitution generated a mismatch between newly assigned smallholder property rights and the indivisible, large-scale socialist capital stock inherited from the collectivization era. Using baseline and synthetic difference-in-differences frameworks based on terrain ruggedness, I demonstrate that this geographic asset mismatch was associated with a severe and persistent decline in mechanized capital across historically fertile plains. Furthermore, I show that post-2007 economic recovery was highly dependent on local institutions: while politically competitive areas successfully adapted through increased rural enterprise, clientelist networks in politically captured counties helped to create a persistent reliance on state subsidies, generating rural “fiscal zombies.”

Policy Papers

Impact of Tariffs on the European Economy
With Tomas Reichenbachas. Bank of Lithuania Topical Commentary, Monetary Policy Division, August 2025. | Download

Motivated by the possibility of shifting US trade strategies and the resulting frictions, this note examines the plausible macroeconomic impacts of US tariffs on European Union goods. Drawing on historical episodes like the 2018 US-China trade tensions, the analysis utilizes empirical trade elasticity proxies and varying tariff pass-through scenarios to quantify potential aggregate export value shocks and subsequent real GDP fluctuations for the European economy. The findings highlight significant heterogeneity in tariff effects across specific product categories and trading partners.

Different Mandate – Same Action: How Have the ECB and the Fed Differed in their Decisions?
With Tomas Reichenbachas. Bank of Lithuania Policy Note, Monetary Policy Division, August 2025. | Download

This note explores the monetary policy responses of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve during major economic crises over the past two decades. Specifically, it analyzes how differing legal frameworks—the Fed’s dual mandate versus the ECB’s single price-stability mandate—have shaped their respective interventions. The analysis finds that while underlying objectives often led to convergent actions during the Global Financial Crisis and post-pandemic inflation surges, the ECB’s narrower mandate notably constrained its policy flexibility during the 2010-2012 sovereign debt crisis, leading to interest rate hikes despite persistently high unemployment.