About

My main research interests involve comparative political economy and historical political economy, focusing on the causes and consequences of economic, social, and ethnoreligious inequality. In particular, I am interested in (i) microfoundations of individual preferences for redistribution and social policies, as well as the distributive and political impact of these preferences, (ii) distributive politics in developing countries; and (iii) the historical political economy of nation-making and state-building in diverse societies. I employ various methodological approaches, including formal modeling, survey and laboratory experiments, archival research, and quasi-experimental observational methods using original data. My research is concentrated in advanced industrialized countries and the Middle East, especially Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

Research topics

• Public economics
• Political Science
• Labour economics
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Monetary economics
• Finance
• Statistics
• Medicine
• Economic policy
• Virology
• Social psychology
• Economic growth
• Mathematics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Tax exposure and political preferences

  Socio-Economic Review · 2026-02-01

  article

  Abstract How do people form preferences over tax policy proposals? This article introduces the concept of tax exposure to explain the determinants of tax preferences. Moving beyond traditional models that link attitudes to taxation in a linear fashion to income or wealth, we argue that preferences are often discontinuous or non-linear around tax thresholds. Furthermore, tax preferences are shaped by both contextual factors, such as the prevailing tax environment and its implications for personal exposure to tax changes, and the partisan context, which informs expectations about the trajectory of future taxation. We test these arguments using three complementary datasets: a conjoint experiment in the United Kingdom (2021), a survey of US tax preferences in the context of the 2018 Trump tax bill, and a cross-national dataset covering 30 countries from 1985 to 2017. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of tax exposure in structuring individual and contextual variation in tax policy preferences.

  PublisherDOI

• Why is it so Hard to Counteract Wealth Inequality? Evidence from the United Kingdom

  World Politics · 2025-07-01 · 5 citations

  article

  abstract: Despite high and rising levels of wealth inequality, many advanced democracies have cut taxes on inherited wealth in recent decades. To explain this puzzle, the authors argue that taxing inherited wealth is politically difficult because, paradoxically, the people who have the strongest material interest in higher taxes—low-wealth renters—are those least likely to express a clear opinion about inheritance taxation. Instead, the political terrain is shaped by the preferences of homeowners and their children, who have a strong material interest in lower inheritance taxes. Empirically, the authors first evaluate this argument using original survey data from the United Kingdom. In two survey experiments, they next examine how exposure to information influences views on inheritance taxation. While the authors find no effect of providing statistical information about the distribution of housing wealth, preferences are influenced by explanatory information that explicitly outlines the potential effects of inheritance taxation.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond the Classroom? Primary Schools and Rural Civic Participatio

  Journal of Historical Political Economy · 2024-02-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Can primary schools aid new states in establishing legitimacy among rural populations? Extensive literature on state-building has demonstrated that primary schools in rural communities play a pivotal role in enhancing state capacity and legitimacy. In addition to educating children, teachers, as knowledgeable state representatives, offer assistance and guidance to local villagers in accessing state tools. We utilize an original dataset from early Republican-era Turkey (1927–1935), which contains information on petitions and primary schools, to examine whether establishing rural schools strengthens the relationship between the state and rural populations. Using a differences-in-differences design, we demonstrate that establishing primary schools does not increase civic engagement with the state, as evidenced by the likelihood of villagers submitting petitions to the national assembly. We argue that in environments characterized by limited development and inhabited by populations facing language barriers and state bias against them, teachers struggle to `build' states.

  PublisherDOI

• The education backlash: How assimilative primary school education affects insurgency in areas of ethnic conflict

  Working Paper Series · 2023-03-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Education is a public service, assumed to be highly valued by citizens, allowing politicians to use it to reward their co-ethnics. However, nation-states have also used education to create loyal citizens, leaving politicians in times of heightened threat of ethnic mobilization. This study investigates whether assimilatory national public investments in ethnic minority areas induce violence. To examine this question, we leverage the spatial and temporal variations in education infrastructure and insurgent recruitment through a difference-in-differences design, focusing on the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. We combine original archival data on the expansion of primary school provision to rural areas and geocoded data on the ethnoreligious distribution of over 30,000 villages in Turkey with data sources that provide information on insurgents’ birthplaces. We find that the expansion of primary school provision in villages increased the likelihood of insurgency participation, despite its potential social mobility effect.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Electoral Responses to the Proximity of Health Care

  The Journal of Politics · 2022-08-15 · 13 citations

  article

  Do voters reward incumbents for the provision of public services? In this article, we study the political economy of catchment areas of public services to answer this question. Rather than examining the binary relationship between health care provision and electoral returns within politically defined borders, we study whether increases in geographic accessibility of health care providers and decreases in congestion in services attract votes for the incumbent. Leveraging a health care reform in Turkey, which substantially impacted the geospatial distribution of public health clinics in Istanbul, we find that decreases in walking time and improvements in congestion levels in the closest clinic from a polling station significantly increase vote share of the AKP, the incumbent party, at that polling station. We also show that poorer communities were more responsive to improvements in spatial accessibility to the local clinics.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Electoral Responses to Proximity of Health Care

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-01-25

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Do voters reward incumbents for the provision of public services? In this paper, we study the political economy of catchment areas of public services to answer this question. Rather than examining the binary relationship between health care provision and electoral returns within politically defined borders, we study whether increases in geographic accessibility of health care providers and decreases in congestion in services attract votes for the incumbent. Leveraging a health care reform in Turkey, which substantially impacted the geospatial distribution of public health clinics in Istanbul, we find that decreases in walking time and improvements in congestion levels in the closest clinic from a polling station significantly increase vote share of the AKP, the incumbent party, at that polling station. We also show that poorer communities were more responsive to improvements in spatial accessibility to the local clinics.

  PublisherDOI

• Combining Mobile Call Data and Satellite Imaging for Human Mobility

  British Academy eBooks · 2022-11-10

  book-chapterSenior author

  Understanding the internal migration patterns of refugee and migrant populations is critical to designing effective policies in host countries. What factors explain refugees’ and migrants’ settlement and relocation choices? Why are they drawn to some districts and not others? Which types of economic activities are most likely to attract refugees and migrants? We investigate these questions by combining mobile call data and satellite imagery for refugees resettled within Turkey. Specifically, we analyse how employment opportunities in different economic sectors shape refugee mobility patterns using data on geo-localised call detail records from 2017 and high-resolution CORINE land cover maps that identify land-use patterns. While most current work on the push and pull factors focuses on the aggregate employment opportunities within administrative units, we focus on the effect of the distance from different types of economic activity on settlement decisions. We find that the results obtained using a ’distance’ approach are substantively and statistically different from the conventional approaches that employ measures aggregated by administrative units. Moreover, our findings relying on the distance-based approach are more consistent with existing literature on internal migration. Specifically, we find that refugees are more likely to relocate to districts geographically closer to urban zones and industrial-commercial zones, but when these two zones are measured by their density, they do not predict the across-district movement patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• The political consequences of housing (un)affordability

  Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) (University of Oxford) · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The enormous growth in house prices in Europe since the 1990s has led to increasing\nconcerns about the affordability of housing for ordinary citizens. This paper explores\nthe relationship between housing affordability - house prices relative to incomes - and\nthe demand for redistributive and housing policy, using data drawn from European and\nBritish social surveys and an analysis of British elections. It shows that, as unaffordability rises, citizens appear in aggregate to become less supportive of redistribution, interventionist housing policy, and left-wing parties. However, this aggregate rise, driven\nby the predominance of homeowners in most European countries, masks a growing\npolarization in preferences between renters and owners in less affordable regions.

  OA PDF

• Distributional Consequences of Philanthropic Contributions to Public Goods: Self-Serving Elite in Ottoman Istanbul

  The Journal of Politics · 2021-05-18 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  While philanthropy is seen as a critical instrument for wealth redistribution in countries with low state capacity or weak welfare institutions, there is little empirical evidence of its distributional consequences. What are the incentives of the rich to philanthropically invest in local public goods? How do these incentives shape inequalities in access to services across ethnic and social groups? I answer these questions by exploiting the fact that fountains in Ottoman Istanbul, a city with rigid religious and social cleavages, were built by the Muslim elite’s private initiatives through the waqf system. Using data on water provision from 1868, I find that elites used philanthropy to benefit themselves disproportionately. Elite neighborhoods were more likely to have water access and had more fountains. Also, Muslim communities were better endowed than non-Muslim communities. I conclude that philanthropy can reproduce or even exacerbate inequalities in access to essential services.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Distributional Consequences of Philanthropic Contributions to Public Goods: Self-Serving Elite in Ottoman Istanbul

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-01-26

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication Data for: Distributional Consequences of Philanthropic Contributions to Public Goods: Self-Serving Elite in Ottoman Istanbul

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gözde Çörekçioğlu

  4 shared

• Fatih Serkant Adiguzel

  Sabancı Üniversitesi

  3 shared

• Ben W. Ansell

  University of Oxford

  3 shared

• Tuğba Bozçağa

  2 shared

• Nela Mrchkovska

  Vienna University of Economics and Business

  1 shared

• Timur Kuran

  Duke University

  1 shared

• Mads Andreas Elkjær

  University of Copenhagen

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• APSA MENA Politics Section Best Article Award (2023)
• Weber Best Paper in Religion and Politics Award by the APSA…
• Best Paper on Social and Economic Inequality Award by the In…
• APSA MENA Politics Section Best Paper Award (2025)