Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Networks Paving the Way: Apprenticeship, Guilds, and Access to Mastership in Early Modern Genoa”. Economic History Review (forthcoming). [WP November 2025]
“The Determinants of the Skill Premium in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800” (with Mattia Fochesato). European Review of Economic History, vol. 29, no. 4 (2025), pp. 534-557.
Working Papers & Research in Progress
- “Saint Roch Playing Favourites? Plague, Product-Market Exposure and Apprentice Wages in Venice, 1594-1663”
Work in progress
[Abstract]
I examine how the 1629-31 plague reshaped apprenticeship remuneration in Venice, and show that its distributional consequences ran along the lines of product-market exposure rather than of occupational hierarchy. Drawing on more than 16,000 apprenticeship contracts, I reconstruct real remuneration inclusive of cash and in-kind components and compare its trajectory across export-intensive and non-export-intensive trades. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that real remuneration rose in both segments after the plague but by approximately 11 per cent more in export-intensive trades, an advantage that persisted for three decades and cannot be attributed to changes in contract duration, in the composition of entrants, or in the structure of payment. The divergence is instead consistent with a uniform contraction in labour supply meeting an asymmetric contraction in product demand, since external markets were less affected by an epidemic whose severity was without parallel elsewhere in Europe. My findings therefore suggest that, contrary to the equalising effects commonly attributed to the Black Death, the 1629-31 plague widened wage differentials among Venetian apprentices.
“By the Roll of a Die: Public Functions and Private Wealth in Pre-Modern Europe” (with Erich Battistin and Mattia Fochesato)
Work in progress- “Four Centuries of Pandemics and Wealth Inequality: Evidence From Northern Italy” (with Guido Alfani)
Work in progress