My research concentrates on applied economics, with a particular focus on economic history, international economics, and political economy.
PUBLICATIONS
Breaking the Unbreakable Union: Nationalism, Disintegration and the Soviet Economic Collapse (2018) Economic Journal, 128(615), p. 2933-2967
This paper investigates the effect of prospective secessions on economic integration and growth by examining the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Firstly, I show theoretically how regional elites had an incentive to restrict domestic trade once secession from the Union became possible. Secondly, I show empirically that the increased likelihood of secessions by the Union’s member republics strongly cut domestic trade. Thirdly, I show how this explains the severity of the Soviet output fall. These patterns persist once I instrument for prospective secessions with nationalist agendas that are exogenous to trade or growth.
Adjusting the Size of Nations: Empirical Determinants of Separatism and the Soviet Breakup (2019) Journal of Comparative Economics, 47(1), p. 50-64
This paper exploits large variation in separatist protests across the 183 provinces of the Soviet Union between 1987 and 1992 to measure the demand for autonomy and secession. This enables an investigation into the theoretical prediction that the incentive to separate should be influenced by the trade-off between the size of the potentially separating jurisdiction and preference heterogeneity. I find evidence consistent with the existence of this trade-off: Regions that are more different from the center along some dimension of heterogeneity see a higher incidence of separatist protests per capita. Likewise, proposals to grant autonomy to large jurisdictions attract disproportionately more popular support. These results persist after controlling for various factors influencing general protest turnout, including repression by the authorities.
Rural Transformation, Inequality, and the Origins of Microfinance (with Nikolaus Wolf, 2020) Journal of Development Economics, 143
What determines the development of rural financial markets? Starting from a simple theoretical framework, we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space. We provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit cooperatives in the 236 eastern counties of Prussia between 1852 and 1913. This setting is attractive as it provides a free market benchmark scenario without public ownership, subsidization, or direct regulatory intervention. Furthermore, we exploit features of our historical set-up to identify causal effects. The results show that declining agricultural staple prices, as a feature of structural transformation, leads to the emergence of credit cooperatives. Similarly, declining bank lending rates contribute to their rise. Low asset sizes and land inequality inhibit the regional spread of cooperatives, while ethnic heterogeneity has ambiguous effects. We also offer empirical evidence suggesting that credit cooperatives accelerated rural transformation by diversifying farm outputs.
Did an oil Shock Cause the Collapse of the Soviet Economy? in Disrupted Economic Relationships: Disasters, Sanctions, Dissolutions (edited by Tibor Besedeš and Volker Nitsch, 2019) MIT Press, p. 249-272
Revisionist interpretations of the end of the Soviet Union argue that oil played a decisive role. This chapter presents an attempt to examine the role of oil in the Soviet collapse conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, it argues that substantial links between the world economy and the domestic Soviet economy are difficult to establish. Empirically, it finds that the oil hypothesis cannot explain the behavior of key macroeconomic aggregates from 1965 to 1992. Moreover, evidence shows that the purchasing power of Soviet oil exports did not change radically between 1980 and 1991. The oil hypothesis is subsequently contrasted with two other explanations of the Soviet collapse: policy and territorial disintegration. It is suggested that these explanations carry substantially greater explanatory power than oil for understanding the Soviet collapse.
The Fiscal State in Africa: Evidence from one century of growth (with Thilo Albers and Morten Jerven) International Organization, Vol. 77, (Winter 2023), pp. 65–101
What is the level of state capacity in developing countries today, and what have been its drivers over the past century? We construct a comprehensive new dataset of tax and revenue collection for 46 African polities from 1900 to 2015. Our data show that polities in Africa have been characterized by strong growth in fiscal capacity on average, but that substantial heterogeneity exists. The empirical analysis reveals that canonical state-building factors such as democratic institutions and interstate warfare have limited power to explain these divergent growth paths. On the other hand, accounting for the relationship between African polities and the international environment – through the availability of external finance and the legacy of colonialism – is key to understanding their differing investments in fiscal capacity. These insights add important nuances to established theories of state building. Not only can the availability of external finance deter investment into fiscal capacity, but it also moderates the efficacy of canonical state-building factors.
Published version (open access)
The Nationalist Dilemma: A Global History of Economic Nationalism (monograph with Cambridge University Press) – Published in June 2023 (United Kingdom) and August 2023 (United States)
Online ISBN: 9781108917087
Financing Late Industrialization: Evidence from the State Bank of the Russian Empire (with Theocharis N. Grigoriadis) The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 85, No. 4 (December 2025).
Gerschenkron (1962) argued that public institutions such as the State Bank of the Russian Empire spurred the country’s industrialization. We test this assertion by exploiting plant-level variation in access to State Bank branches using a unique geocoded factory data set. Employing an identification strategy based on geographical distances between banks and factories, our results show improved access to public banking encouraged faster growth in factory-level revenue, mechanization, and labor productivity. In line with theories of late industrialization, we also find evidence that public credit mattered more in regions where commercial banks were fewer and markets were smaller.
Published version (open access)
Discussion Paper: Trinity Economics Papers 0225 (2025)
On the Persistence of Persistence: Lessons from Long Term Trends in African Institutions (with Morten Jerven) African Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adaf027 (December 2025), pp. 1-28
An influential strand of literature within economics and economic history called ‘persistence studies’ argues that low material living standards in African countries today were determined by institutional choices made in the past. However, the lack of consistent annual data on GDP per capita or institutional variables has meant that this literature has been largely silent as to whether their proposed relationships hold throughout the period it studies. This has made persistence studies vulnerable to criticisms of making leaps of faith or contributing to a ‘compression of history’. Here, we draw on a data set of tax revenues for African polities for the period 1900-2015, with which we proxy the institutional capacity of a state. We then test whether some of the most influential determinants stressed in the persistence literature exert a consistent effect on our measure of institutions. Our findings suggest that the effect of population density and colonizer identity on institutions is not persistent. We find mixed results for precolonial centralization and ethnic fractionalization, while results for slave exports and settler mortality are more in accordance with theory. Overall, our results support the view that historical persistence should be measured, not simply assumed.
Published version (open access)
Working paper: Trinity Economic Papers 1225 (2025)
Decolonization and Fiscal Capacity: Event Study Evidence from Africa (with Dhammika Dharmapala)
A vast literature across several academic disciplines studies the impact of colonial rule, but less attention has been paid to the consequences of decolonization. This paper uses a recently-constructed dataset on the fiscal history of African countries from 1900 to 2015 to analyze the impact of decolonization on fiscal capacity (defined as revenue from taxes that are relatively difficult to collect and that require more administrative infrastructure). The analysis adopts a staggered difference-indifference approach, implemented using a stacked event study. It finds no discernible pre-trends prior to decolonization, and a substantial increase in fiscal capacity starting about 5-6 years after decolonization. This result-which implies substantial state-building activity in postcolonial Africa-is robust to tests for a variety of alternative explanations, the use of alternative control groups, and the use of generalized synthetic control methods. We also show that this effect is not explained by democratization or improved public goods provision. Our conceptual framework instead posits that post-colonial states were able to increase tax revenues from hard-to-collect sources because their higher degree of legitimacy improved citizens‘ tax morale. We offer historical evidence that is consistent with this channel. Our finding-that colonial rulers invested less in fiscal capacity than did post-independence governments-sheds new light on the consequences of colonial rule, and on the determinants of variation in governments‘ fiscal capacity.
Working Paper available at SSRN and CESifo
The Industrial Geography of Eurasia in the Twentieth Century: Soviet Planners meet Tsarist Fundamentals (with Iris Wohnsiedler)
How responsive is the location of economic activity to shocks? This paper uses a new data set on the location of factories in the Russian Empire (1890, 1908) and the Soviet Union (1989), supported by modern nightlight data to explore the forces determining the spatial location of industrial production in Eurasia since the late nineteenth century. Over this period, the region experienced a radical shift in its economic system from market to central planning and back again. Production was also subjected to various large shocks, including war and the associated relocation of firms to the east, forced population movement, and infrastructure investments. We assess to what extent these shocks changed the role of agglomeration effects, local labour inputs and market access in determining industry location. We find that shocks to labour fundamentals were able to shift the economy to new spatial equilibria. Nonetheless, the shifts were small in magnitude and these forces were not powerful enough to eradicate the path-dependent effects of Tsarist locations that were still evident in the industrial structure of the region even a century later. These results suggest that Soviet Union’s impact on the spatial economy of Eurasia was less transformative than previously believed.
SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS
Market Integration and Nutrition across sub-Saharan Africa (with Andrea Guariso and Aislinn Hoy)
Geography and the Formation of Ethno-linguistic Communities (with Sascha Becker, Kalle Kappner and Nikolaus Wolf)
Can African governments effectively tax mineral resources? An Empirical Investigation, 1960-2020 (with Thilo Albers)
Underrepresented Majorities: Ethnicity, Gender and Social Status of Russian Entrepreneurs 1809-1908 (with Elena Korchmina)
The Legacy of Apartheid on South African Labour Markets (with Talent Nesongano, Carol Newman and John Rand)
Why Russia did not get there First: Industrialisation, Misallocation and Productivity, 1725-1908 (with Andrei Markevich)
Rural Reform and Deglobalisation: Turkish Agricultural Growth during the Great Depression (with Ulas Karakoc)
Marvin Suesse 