Essays in Political Inequality

My project studies the causes and consequences of economic and political inequality. In particular, I investigate the relationship between political power and wealth and the interaction between redistributive forces and political outcomes.

To do this, I leverage data from UK wealth-at-death records from 1858 to present day, relating individual-level wealth data to the political process. Using this, in three separate papers, I establish 1) how the intergenerational relationship between wealth and power has changed over time and how this has been affected by the introduction of higher marginal tax rates for the rich; 2) how the individual wealth of politicians has affected the democratic political process through its effect on party politics and individual political preferences; 3) the extent to which descriptive and substantive representation has changed as a result of the successive enfranchisement of poorer segments of society.

My project sheds light on fundamental economic and political theories and establishes some of the first descriptive and causal evidence on how individual wealth has affected the perpetuation of power at the individual and party level, and thus the distribution of resources across society. It employs standard econometric techniques (for example, regression discontinuity design) used in the Economic literature to achieve these goals.