The goal of this paper is to study the impact of the lockdown policy on voting behaviour, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on France, where a differential lockdown was implemented across departments, based on the local diffusion of the disease. In particular, the country has been divided...

This paper studies the long-term effect of taxation on economic geography and development. We rely on a unique natural experiment in place during France’s ancien régime: the salt tax. Introduced in the late 13th century and abrogated by the French Revolution in 1789, the salt tax was not...

We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax - a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity design (RDD), we find that parts...

We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax - a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity design (RDD), we find that parts...