This is list of papers or projects I have or I am currently working on. Please reach out if you have any questions or requests and I will try my best to accommodate.
Working Papers
Late Medieval Unrest in the Holy Roman Empire: Causes and Consequences
Long-standing narratives of medieval unrest emphasize subsistence crises as primary causes of unrest. Using a newly constructed dataset of 491 episodes of unrest, I link annual, geolocated records of these events to climatic, demographic, and institutional variables to test the relative influence of structural and contingent factors on unrest likelihood. Results show that while environmental stress—particularly prolonged drought—modestly increases the probability of unrest, institutional characteristics such as public representation and guild inclusion play a more significant role. Cities with inclusive governance structures were more resilient to unrest, while guild-dominated regimes became increasingly prone to conflict over time. These findings challenge deterministic accounts of medieval rebellion and highlight the importance of local political structures in mediating collective action.
Did Newspaper Competition Promote Rebellion? The Case of the 1837-38 Rebellions in Quebec
We investigate the relationship between media competitiveness and political mobilization during the Quebec Rebellion of 1837–38. We argue that the rebellion was shaped by newspaper coordination of political action. Drawing on a new spatial dataset of newspaper agents, we test whether local media competitiveness predicts the intensity of rebel mobilization, independent of the partisan alignment of the press. The effect is magnified in areas where seigneurial (i.e., feudal) tenure persisted, suggesting a complementarity between institutionally concentrated grievance and competitive press exposure. Adding newly created human capital controls—school enrollment and literacy—does not attenuate the competition effect. Globally, media competition transformed latent discontent into active participation in the conflict. These results offer insight into the economics of rebellions and uprisings.
The Specter of Slavery: Newspapers During the American Civil War
Over the course of the 19th century, the press emerged as a critical arena for shaping political narratives. This study investigates how Civil War-era newspapers strategically amplified slavery-related discourse to influence electoral outcomes in Union states between 1860 and 1864. Drawing on over one million newspaper articles, the analysis employs topic modeling and cosine similarity measures to track the salience of slavery, abolition, and racial language in the months preceding congressional elections. Slavery-related discourse intensifies in the three months prior to elections, peaking one month before. Results indicate that greater similarity to slavery-related topics is associated with significantly higher Democratic vote share, particularly in the month prior to the election. Republican vote shares show no parallel effect or a muted inverse relationship. These findings suggest that newspapers not only reflected public sentiment but acted as partisan instruments, shaping electoral behavior by modulating the salience and framing of slavery-related issues. This contributes to the literature on political communication and media partisanship by demonstrating how ideological media coverage can influence voter alignment during periods of institutional upheaval.
In Progress
The Effects of Bureacracy on Pandemic Outcomes
Council or Court? Judicial Competition in Early Modern Germany
Political Autonomy and Long-Run Urban Growth in Germany