CERGIC
Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality and Conflict.

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.

We document variations in real income for high-skilled, low-skilled, and rural migrant households across Chinese cities. Using comprehensive data on land parcel transactions along with individual data for land development and household expenditure, we construct a city-specific housing cost index and assess how it varies across locations. All three components of housing costs –unit land prices, land share in construction, and housing share in expenditure– decrease from city centres to the periphery, increase with city population, and decrease with city land area, as predicted by theory. Overall, housing costs in China are high and vary widely between locations. While income gains outweigh housing costs when moving from smaller to larger cities, in the largest cities, housing costs begin to dominate, particularly for low-skilled and rural migrant households. This suggests a bell-shaped relationship between real income and city population in China, aligning with theoretical predictions.

Performance indicators transform political press coverage, yet their effects on MPs' behavior remain unstudied. Using Nosdeputes.fr, the French website computing such indicators, we address this gap. We compile a comprehensive dataset of press articles, identifying all mentions of MPs' indicators, to disentangle the effects of the website from those of indicator coverage. Performances increase following the website's launch, further amplified by coverage. However, MPs explicitly mentioned do not show additional improvements. While transparency prompts some manipulatione.g., increased copy-pasting-there is no evidence of strategic inflation in amendments or speeches. Thus, indicators enhance collective but not individual accountability, with limited adverse effects.

This chapter examines the evolution of working conditions in pre-industrial Normandy, focusing on the longstanding debates over working time and public holidays. During the Middle Ages. theologians like Nicolas de Clamanges criticised the rising number of non-working religious days, arguing that they promoted non-religious behaviour and harmed poor workers. This debate persisted in the following centuries, particularly between Catholic and Protestant intellectuals. More recently, seminal works in economic history have emphasised the significance of working days for our understanding of past living standards, prompting further methodological refinements. Using new data on religious holidays and payment records, we assess the actual versus theoretical working days in Normandy from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Our analysis suggests that the common assumption that 250 working days per year was the norm for many labourers during the late Middle Ages. This figure seems, however, higher for the later period. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for individuals to work as many as 290-300 days per year. We further explore changes in labour regulations to document daily working conditions, showing that working hours increased by one to two hours per day between the Middle Age and the late eighteenth century. While we focus on Normandy, an important commercial and industrial centre in France, we believe this study offers valuable insights into the economic history of early modern Europe.

We develop a novel approach for estimating the economic costs of conflict, using the production network as the primary mechanism through which the disruptive effects of localized conflict spread to peaceful areas. Applying this approach to the Maoist insurgency in Eastern India from 2000 to 2009, we quantify the overall impact of conflict, taking network propagation into account. Our key finding reveals that a one percentage point increase in conflict-induced distortion is associated with an average annual decrease of 0.236% in aggregate output. Notably, 73% of the total output loss can be attributed to network propagation.