In progress
1) "Legibility's unequal byproducts"
Abstract: When and why are the state and its agents' technocratic methods and political motives for collecting information consequential for economic equity? This phenomenon, a concept termed ``legibility" by Scott (1998), is often associated with reduced economic inequality by other scholars in the field. I argue that this overlooks a crucial source of variation in legibility's impact on inequality: the local interlocutors who influence how, about whom, and what the state learns. If these local interlocutors are socially embedded and capable of threatening violence, they construct asymmetrical legibility by selectively reporting their assets while accurately reporting others. When unmediated by other policies, this imbalance in the state's knowledge of the distribution of economic assets has a regressive impact on economic equality. Leveraging annual Nile flood-driven changes to riparian farmland boundaries as a randomized encouragement of government legibility, I plan on applying an instrumented two-way fixed effects design to show how the British colonial state's legibility expansions in Khedival Egypt exacerbated land inequality. This project aims to illustrate the relationship between legibility and inequality to reconcile when and why government legibility influences economic equity.
2) "A Monarch's MapQuest: How ruler-elite relations shape state power"
Abstract: Classic works in the state building literature rely on the assumption that a state’s de jure geographic boundaries define a pre-modern monarch’s de facto authority. Recent works, however, argue that elite social networks significantly shaped the de facto power of the pre-modern ruler. Using geo-coded data of English monarch location from 1327 to 1377, I construct a new measure of pre-modern England's de facto state power via royal authority. Leveraging exogenous shocks to ruler-elite relations via deaths caused by the Black Death's first outbreak in England in 1348, this project probes the relationship between elite networks and de facto state power.