Emilio Depetris-Chauvin

IEA: You have worked on a very wide array of topics ranging from nationalism and state conflict to guns and the division of labor in pre-industrial times. Can you tell us a little bit about your research strategy and how you decide to work on these quite different topics.

Emilio: This is a question I get very often. While I do see my research agenda as eclectic, I primarily conceive of myself as an applied economist who enjoys interdisciplinary work. I think I work on all these different topics because of my journey as a grad student at Brown University. When I started my Phd I was not 100% sure about what fields to take, so I ended up taking classes on very different topics from development and growth to applied metrics, urban and public economics. Therefore, I was lucky to learn about long-run development and growth from David Weil, Oded Galor, and Stelios Michalopoulos and about political economy/public economics from Brian Knight and Pedro Dal Bo. My interactions with all these great scholars shaped my research agenda back then. While I have expanded my set of topics since, there is still some path dependence in my work which is, broadly speaking, on long-run development and political economy.

Nonetheless, one of my main interests is understanding the causes and consequences of conflict. A curiosity motivated by the fact that conflict remains a significant obstacle to economic development. I am particularly interested in a series of fundamental questions: Why do people fight? Why conflict ever occurs at all? Why would two rational competing actors choose violence over a bargained solution? Is there any societal arrangement (either institutional or cultural) that could prevent conflict from occurring? A big chunk of my research is related to these fundamental questions.

Regarding my research on long-run development, I have always been interested in understanding the reasons underlying contemporary differences in the standard of livings across the globe. Then I went to Brown to learn that part of these differences in development was deeply rooted in history, so understanding the past can help us understand the present. Using data and statistical methods is an excellent way to understand the past and its link with the present. When I discover an unanswered question on this topic, find appropriate data, and elucidate an empirical strategy to address that question, I go for it.

There is also another critical factor in deciding which research project to start: coauthors. Most of my coauthors are my friends, so we talk a lot about everything but mainly about the state of the art in our field. This process of brainstorming ideas is the genesis of a project. One is usually thinking about several ideas, all the time, and most of these ideas never turn into a paper, and only a few of them end up in a publication. Here I would like to say that none of my projects would have been possible without the help and hard work of my research assistants. When you do empirical work, you rely a lot on your research team.

IEA: You are from and currently teach in Chile. How has your background affected your approach to economics and what you study?

Emilio: I live and teach in Chile, but I am originally from the other side of the Andes mountains: Argentina, where a long list of serious economic problems (e.g., hyperinflations, balance of payment crisis, etc) occurred during my formative years, including the most profound economic and social crisis in the country’s history. Puzzled by these recurrent episodes, I decided to study economics as an undergraduate. Over time, particularly after I finished a master’s degree in economics in Argentina, I realized I did not want to study monetary/short-run macroeconomics. In any case, Brown was strong at Growth and Development when I started grad school hence I began working on topics that were not necessarily relevant to my home country (i.e., sort-run macro). Therefore, I would say that my Argentine background did not substantially affect my approach to economics as a researcher. It only affected me in becoming an economist.