The political costs of taxation

We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period.

Finalist, CESifo Award in Public Economics (2025)

with J. Enguehard & I. Kolesnikov

Emotions and policy views

This paper investigates the growing role of emotions in shaping policy views. Analyzing social citizens' media postings and political party messaging over a large variety of policy issues from 2013 to 2024, we document a sharp rise in negative emotions, particularly anger. Content generating anger drives significantly more engagement. We then conduct two nationwide online experiments in the U.S, exposing participants to video treatments that induce positive or negative emotions to measure their causal effects on policy views. The results show that negative emotions increase support for protectionism, restrictive immigration policies, redistribution, and climate policies but do not reinforce populist attitudes. In contrast, positive emotions have little effect on policy preferences but reduce populist inclinations. Finally, distinguishing between fear and anger, we find that anger exerts a much stronger influence on citizens’ policy views, in line with its growing presence in the political rhetoric.

with Y. Algan & T. Renault & S. Stantcheva

Work In Progress

Early Modern Tax Technology: Local Evidence from the French Gabelle with J. Enguehard, V. Gay & I. Kolesnikov

Avoiding Evasion: Effects of the Automatic Exchange of Information with S. Le Guern Herry, E. Le Pouhaër  & W. Leenders

Legal Antecedents of Fiscal Capacity: Evidence from D.R. Congo with A. Bergeron, G. Granato, M. Ngoma, J. Robinson & J. Weigel