About Me
I am a PhD candidate at Paris Dauphine University PSL under the supervision of Guillaume Daudin and Marion Mercier.
My research mainly focuses on conflict economics and economic history.
Specifically, my thesis studies the links between social capital, conflict, and innovation.
I am particularly interested in the French Revolution, machine learning and quantitative text analysis methods.
Please take a look at the pre-analysis plan of my main project : here.
My Research
Work in Progress
The Ties That Bind... and Divide : The Effect of Social Capital on Violence during the French Revolution, 2025
This project aims to study the impact of social capital on violence during the French Revolution. Social capital, which captures a group's propensity for cooperation, was studied as a consequence of conflict but may also be a major determinant of conflict. Especially as social capital is theorized to have divergent effects on conflict depending on whether it is of the "bridging" (cross-group) or "bonding" (within-group) variety. The French Revolution provides a unique setting to examine this dynamic. In 1789, the Estates-General was summoned, leading to the collection of detailed grievance lists (the Cahiers de Doléances) that offer a window into local social dynamics just prior to the onset of violence. Analyzing the content of these cahiers can shed light on both bridging and bonding social capital from an area. Linking these measures to subsequent patterns of revolutionary violence across France holds the potential to generate interesting new findings. Using a varied empirical framework, this work aims to provide robust evidence on the complex relationship between social capital and conflict. The use of text-based data sources analyzed through machine learning methods and the focus on different geographic scales in a highly relevant context will allow for a comprehensive investigation of this key issue for long-term development and peace-building.
Do Brains Like Riots ? : the Conflict's Effect on Innovation, 2025 (joint work with Matteo Neri--Laine)
Innovation is a central element for long-term economic development but is also extremely vulnerable. This paper analyzes the impact of conflicts on innovation by focusing on riots in 19th-century France. By combining data on conflict events and patents at the communal level since 1791, we employ a difference-in-differences approach. We demonstrate that a 100% increase in the number of conflict events reduces local innovation by 30%. Furthermore, the negative effect of these shocks persists over more than one century. An instrumental variable strategy and an event study confirm the causal interpretation of our results. By examining the underlying mechanism, we show that the effect of conflicts on innovation (i) is driven by the bourgeois' response in capital-intensive sectors and (ii) operates through a major drop in local wealth.
A Theory of Social Capital and Conflict, 2025
Coming soon.