About

Mark Dincecco is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His research examines the process of political and economic development both historically and today, with a focus on the drivers of effective governance and its implications for economic prosperity. He has published numerous articles in leading journals across both political science and economics. Dincecco is the author or coauthor of three books: 'Political Transformations and Public Finances: Europe, 1650–1913,' 'State Capacity and Economic Development: Present and Past,' and, with Massimiliano Onorato, 'From Warfare to Wealth: The Military Origins of Urban Prosperity in Europe,' which won the William Riker Best Book Award. His current book manuscript, coauthored with Gary Cox and Yuhua Wang, titled 'The Power of Limits: Executive Constraints and State Evolution in China and the West,' is under contract with Princeton University Press for publication in 2027. He serves as the Editor of the Elements in Political Economy series at Cambridge University Press. Dincecco received his PhD in Economics from UCLA and has been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Political economy
• Law
• Sociology
• History
• Geography
• Economy
• Development economics

Selected publications

• <span>Maintaining Empire: The Examination System and Secessionist Conflict in Imperial China</span>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Introduction of the Income Tax, Fiscal Capacity, and Migration: Evidence from US States

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2024-01-31 · 7 citations

  article

  We evaluate how fiscal capacity and migration respond to the introduction of the individual income tax, drawing on new panel data on US states from 1900 to 2010. We find that the introduction of the income tax increased revenue per capita by 12 percent in the short term, 15 percent in the medium term, and 17 percent in the long term. The absolute level of revenue, however, did not significantly change over the long term for post–World War II adopters. To explain this, we show that the introduction of the income tax induced significant outmigration to non-income-tax states by middle- and high-earning households. (JEL H71, H73, N32, N42, N92, R23)

  PublisherDOI

• Warfare, Fiscal Gridlock, and State Formation During Europe’s Military Revolution

  The Journal of Politics · 2024-12-12 · 2 citations

  article

  We introduce a political scope condition for the classic argument that war motivates expansions in the state’s fiscal capacity. All major medieval European monarchies separated the power to tax from the power to spend. We argue that this fiscal separation of powers engendered gridlock, which became increasingly intolerable after 1500 due to the military revolution and the greater role of money in battlefield victory. European states thus reformed toward one of two stable equilibria – fiscal absolutism or parliamentarism. Elsewhere in Eurasia, states were already fiscally absolutist, and thus war pressures did not provoke similar reform efforts. Exploiting new panel data on 101 European territorial units, we document how external war pressures promoted reforms in a majority of units toward fiscal absolutism (which took a distinctive decentralized form), with a minority of units adopting fiscal parliamentarism (either centralized or decentralized), and peripheral units retaining fiscal separations of power (and hence gridlock).

  PublisherDOI

• Conflict and Gender Norms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• New Perspectives on State Formation

  Perspectives on Politics · 2023-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Governments in developed nations today collect high tax revenues and spend vast amounts on security, regulation, infrastructure, and social programs. Yet developed nations were in no way born with effective state institutions. What explains the emergence of the modern state? And, why did capable states first form historically in Western Europe? Proper answers to these questions are key to our understanding of modern forms of governance, including parliamentary democracy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Window of Opportunity: War and the Origins of Parliament

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-04-07 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts, while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers’ need to finance wars with that emphasizing the importance of the medieval communal revolution. Using novel data, we document a “no communes, no parliaments” rule: monarchs established parliaments only after they had fostered the creation of self-governing towns (aka communes). We also show that war was a significant predictor of parliamentary births across medieval Europe – but only during a window of opportunity that opened after a polity had experienced the communal revolution.

  PublisherDOI

• Window of Opportunity: War and the Origins of Parliament

  British Journal of Political Science · 2023-05-17 · 24 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Two important puzzles characterize the development of pre-modern Eurasian polities. First, most rulers convened councils of nobles, but only European monarchs expanded them to create parliaments. Second, war was common throughout Eurasia, but only in Europe did it correlate with the formation of parliaments. We advance a new argument about the emergence of parliaments that accounts for both stylized facts while integrating the literature highlighting the rulers' need to finance wars with that emphasizing the importance of the medieval communal revolution. Using novel data, we document a ‘no communes, no parliaments’ rule: monarchs established parliaments only after they had fostered the creation of self-governing towns (aka communes). We also show that war was a significant predictor of parliamentary births across medieval Europe – but only during a window of opportunity that opened after a polity had experienced the communal revolution.

  PublisherDOI

• State Capacity in Historical Political Economy

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022-10-20 · 18 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter evaluates state capacity from a long-run historical perspective. We discuss how to define and measure state capacity. We explain how the establishment of a high-capacity state can enhance domestic peace, improve material prosperity, and promote more pluralistic norms. We describe which factors have obstructed the historical development of high-capacity states. Finally, we characterize ways in which society can harness the various public goods that a capable state can provide, while reducing its potential to act despotically.

  PublisherDOI

• State Capacity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Napoleon in Italy: A Legacy of Institutional Reform?

  2021-12-13 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The economic consequences of French conquest and rule in Italy remain unclear. Recent GDP estimates suggest that the early 1800s were characterized by a short-lived rebound, interrupting a long-run decline from the 1720s to the 1870s. We evaluate the extent to which French rule can help explain this rebound. Similarly, we study to what extent the economic policy of the post-1815 Restoration can explain the return to a downward economic trajectory. Finally, we analyze the legacy of institutional reforms initiated during the Napoleonic era for modern economic growth in the late nineteenth century. Overall, our analysis draws a distinction between the short run and the long run. The evidence suggests that the short-run economic and social costs of French rule in Italy outweighed any economic gains. By improving the underlying institutional environment, however, Napoleon's economic legacy may have been beneficial to long-run development, but only after several decades and the establishment of further institutional reforms, pioneered by Piedmont from 1848 onward, and adopted throughout Italy after the political unification of the peninsula in 1861.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato

  26 shared

• James Fenske

  16 shared

• Anil Menon

  University of California, Merced

  9 shared

• Yuhua Wang

  6 shared

• Gary W. Cox

  6 shared

• Shivaji Mukherjee

  University of Toronto

  6 shared

• Traviss Cassidy

  University of Alabama

  5 shared

• Ugo Troiano

  University of California, Riverside

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of California Los Angeles

Awards & honors

• William Riker Best Book Award