Research

Job Market Paper

History written by the Loser: Centralization and Confederate Narratives in Southern Textbooks

(with Pedro Aldighieri)

Can partial centralization of school history curriculum pose problems for nation building? We study such centralization in the United States, where in the early twentieth century Southern states moved the choice of school textbooks from county committees to state commissions. Drawing on a novel dataset of 539 editions of school history textbooks used between 1870 and 1930, we measure pro-Southern slant with large language models. Exploiting variation in the timing of the centralization of textbook choice, we find that it raised the share of pro-Southern Civil War passages by 21 percentage points. The reform gave Confederate heritage organizations a single body to lobby, increasing returns to lobbying: textbooks such organizations condemned fell out of use faster in centralized states than where county committees retained the choice. We trace these textbooks into adulthood: men exposed to pro-Southern textbooks as children held a stronger Southern identity and were more supportive of racial violence throughout their lives.

  • Conference presentations: The 1st ASREC Thematic Workshop, CEPR Applied Micro-Economic History Workshop, 11th Monash-Paris-Warwick-Zurich-CEPR Text-As-Data Workshop, The Doctorissimes conference, FRESH workshop Berlin, European Association of Young Economists Annual Meeting, Computational Economic History Workshop in Vienna, SIOE 2026 conference, VII Job Market Bootcamp, Zurich Workshop in AI & Applied Economics 2026, Methodological Advances in Quantitative Economic History workshop (scheduled)
  • Invited talks: LSE SPEECH seminar
  • Internal talks: PSE GPET seminar, PSE Applied Economics Lunch seminar

Working papers

Failing to forge the New Soviet Woman: Long-term effect of WW2-induced male scarcity on family formation

Does male scarcity empower women, or, conversely, push them to conform to traditional gender roles? Existing work finds that male scarcity expands women's autonomy. Drawing on the episode of male scarcity caused by 27 million Soviet casualties during WWII, I find that it entrenched family-oriented societal norms and increased family formation in the long run. I exploit variation in the 1959 female share across regions and birth cohorts, and instrument it with region-cohort military fatality rates built from 11 million draft records. In the short run male scarcity worsened women's marriage prospects: exposed cohorts married less, remarried less often, and had fewer children. Yet, the exposed generation was more likely to see marriage as a lifelong commitment and two-parent families as the norm, a preference they could not act on in a thin marriage market but transmitted to their children. In the next generation the marriage and fertility effects reverse: children of exposed parents marry more and have more children, and they divorce less, as their parents did. Female employment responded to male scarcity only briefly, and attitudes quickly turned against women's employment. Overall, male scarcity entrenches family-oriented norms where no empowerment through participation in the labor force is possible, and state propaganda holds the family's importance in place.

Work in progress

  • The Political Effects of Russian TV Propaganda in the Baltics
    (with Gisli Gylfason and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya) Using the 2022 ban on Russian state television in Estonia and Latvia, this project studies how losing access to propaganda affects voting behaviour.
  • Area- and Population-Based Geographic Crosswalks for USSR Regions, 1897–2010
    (with Natalya Naumenko) Administrative boundaries in the former Soviet Union changed frequently between 1897 and 2010, so regional data are not comparable over time. We construct area- and population-based crosswalks that make them comparable.
  • The Political Economy of Russian Military Mobilization
    (with Anastasiia Arbuzova and Joseph Enguehard) This project studies the local economic effects of wartime transfers, the enlistment bonuses paid to contract recruits and the death gratuities paid to their families, measuring local activity with satellite data.