Research
Working Papers
Itinerant Kings
Abstract: Rather than govern from a fixed capital, medieval European kings were itinerant. I argue that itinerant kingship was a rational coalition-building strategy employed by relatively weak rulers in the face of potentially violent elites. To empirically explore itinerant kingship, I introduce data on the daily location of the English king from 1199 to 1547. Utilizing genealogical data for feudal barons, I show that the king's itinerary targeted “key players” within the elite network to maintain political support. When the Early Modern “military revolution” increased the military power of the king vis-à-vis the elites, European kings adopted stationary governments.
Read the latest draft here.
Magna Carta
(with Mark Koyama and Desiree Desierto)
Abstract: Magna Carta, a pivotal moment in history, institutionalized constraints on royal power. As an ideal, Magna Carta prescribes an ‘inclusive’ power-sharing arrangement in which the ruler (king) has limited power and elites (barons) have equal rights. It was forged in a feudal environment and fought between a coalition of the king’s loyal barons and a coalition of rebel barons. We derive conditions under which Magna Carta occurs in equilibrium: when the king is extractive; when the initial distribution of power among barons is egalitarian; and when barons have large resources that cannot be easily appropriated by the king. Under these conditions, even the most powerful baron would be willing to change the status quo by leading a rebel coalition to fight for Magna Carta. To provide empirical support, we build a unique dataset of the universe of English barons, their family networks, and their baronies and resources between 1200-1270.
Read the latest draft here.
Railroads and American Institutional Change
(with Slade Mendenhall)
Abstract: For roughly 800 years, "legislation" largely meant special legislation: narrow bills tailored to the demands of particular persons, firms, or property. General laws were greeted with suspicion. Today, the reverse is true: it is believed that laws, to be good, must be broad, and states have overwhelmingly banned special bills. This article reconceives of this history, understanding special legislation and the modern administrative state as substitutes. It argues that, contrary to the accompanying anti-corruption rhetoric, the refashioning of legislation as it had always existed was born of politicians' desire to create and extract rents made possible by the 19th-century transportation boom. The emergence of the administrative state and the growth of American state capacity are thus understood as the endogenous fruits of industrialization.
Read the latest draft here.
The King's French: The Political Economy of Language
(with Alexander Taylor)
Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of state-building on linguistic transition and standardization in Early Modern France. Using the Universal Short Title Catalogue, we construct a city-decade panel of printing activity in European cities from 1500 to 1650. We then estimate the impact of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, an ordinance requiring the use of French—rather than Latin—in all legal documents, on French language printing using a difference-in-discontinuities design. Results suggest that the ordinance had spillover effects on non-legal printed materials, promoting the general use of vernacular language in print. The findings have implications for the role of the state in shaping national identity and the legibility of the law.
Read the latest draft here.
Selected Works in Progress
Islam, Trade, and the Rise of Northwestern Europe
(with Marcus Shera)
Abstract: The population of the ancient world was centered around the Mediterranean Sea. But in the eighth century, the new religion of Islam spread rapidly, achieving spiritual and political dominance in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian peninsula. Religious, political, linguistic, and legal differences between Muslims and the existing Christian kingdoms increased transaction costs for trade between the regions. Locations on the Mediterranean coast, formerly well positioned for trade with Egpyt, Syria, Anatolia, and the Levant lost trade potential relative to places in Europe that could take advantage of North Sea trade. We use a differences-in-differences approach to show that European urban population with greater market access to the Islamic world shrinks after AD 700 relative to Northern population.
Refereed Publications
Travel Speed over the Longue Durée
European Review of Economic History, forthcoming.
Abstract: In the premodern world, slow travel speed increased a ruler's governance costs and acted as a barrier to trade. But current estimates of medieval European travel speed are sparse, and the estimates that do exist rely on parsimonious data. Using the daily travel itineraries of medieval kings, I create near-continuous time series of travel speed along roads in England and France over four centuries. Average travel speed along the Medieval roads is estimated to be around 15 to 20 miles per day. Those average estimates remain fairly stable over the entire medieval period, although there is a great amount of heterogeneity at the journey level.
Why Lords Went for Luxuries
The Independent Review, forthcoming.
(with Daniel B. Klein)
Abstract: In Smith’s Wealth of Nations telling of political evolution 1400–1700, he leaves us wondering why lords went for luxuries. They bartered away their armies and power. Drawing on Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence, we explain why lords went for luxuries. The center, led by the king and his ministers, fostered new ways for a baron to signal his wealth and value as an ally. A diamond buckle signaled wealth, as did a retinue of 1000 men. But the baron could not bring 1000 rustics along to the pageant, for he alone had been invited. Instead, he brought bling. This explanation, implicating government and politics in the vanity and fetishization of bling, is hinted at in The Wealth of Nations when Smith writes cryptically of “the judges that were to determine the preference.”
Did the Great Leveling Begin After 1921?
Scandinavian Economic History Review, 2025.
(with Vincent Geloso and Patrick Fitzsimmons)
Abstract: The U-Curve of income inequality in the United States is a longstanding stylised fact in economic history. The ‘Great Leveling’ that led to the trough that lasted from the 1940s to the early 1980s is argued by scholars like Piketty and Saez (2003. Income inequality in the United States, 1913–1998. The Quarterly journal of economics, 118(1), 1–41) to have occurred suddenly and precipitously during the 1940s, whereas others such as Geloso et al. (2022. How pronounced is the U-curve? Revisiting income inequality in the United States, 1917–60. The Economic Journal, 132(647), 2366–2391) argue that the levelling was gradual and began with the Great Depression. In this paper, we argue that large regional differences in price levels make it hard to measure ‘real’ inequality levels. More importantly, since these regional price differences collapsed during the first half of the twentieth century, the trends in ‘real’ income inequality could be very different from those determined using ‘nominal’ income. Adjusting income levels for regional price levels shows a faster decline in inequality across the period from 1921 to 1941. We argue that this indicates the Great Leveling was a gradual process that began earlier than the 1940s.
Read the article here.
From Hume to Smith on the Common Law and English Liberty: A Comment on Paul Sagar
Econ Journal Watch, 2022.
Abstract: Paul Sagar, in his 2021 Political Theory article “On the Liberty of the English: Adam Smith’s Reply to Montesquieu and Hume,” discusses the role that the common law plays in Smith’s account of English liberty. In doing so he fashions something of a divide between Smith and David Hume with respect to their views on the development of liberty in England. As I see it, the divide between Smith and Hume is less than Sagar suggests, if it exists at all. I highlight Hume’s discussions of English common law in his History of England. In doing so, I make more apparent the shared sentiments between Hume and Smith on the importance of the legal system for the development of English liberty. Rather than replying to Hume, Smith should be seen as developing on Hume’s ideas and disseminating the results, by way of both his Glasgow classroom and The Wealth of Nations. Not once does Sagar cite volumes 1 and 2 of Hume’s History of England, though they contain much that dovetails with and no doubt fed Smith’s interpretations.
Read the article here.
Classical Liberals on ‘Social Justice’
Economic Affairs, 2020.
(with Marcus Shera)
Abstract: In the summer of 2019, The Independent Review published a symposium on classical liberalism and social justice. We give an overview and commentary on the symposium papers. Rather than adopting the term social justice, we recommend returning to the three senses of justice maintained by Adam Smith and explained by Daniel Klein (2019). We articulate and explore Smith’s tripartite understanding of justice in contrast with an understanding that gives place to the expression social justice. Smith’s tri-layered understanding is in the spirit of addressing the micro-foundations of macrophenomena, the spirit of Thomas Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior.
Read the article here.