Jorge Mangonnet wins top prize for dissertation on property rights
Prize Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College Jorge Mangonnet has won the Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in political economy from the American Political Science Association.
Focusing on Imperial Brazil, his dissertation - Property Formation, Labor Repression, and State Capacity in Imperial Brazil - examined how the abolition of slavery encourages elites to create private property rights. This prevents the rural poor from having free access to land and pushes them to work in agriculture.
His dissertation has implications for understanding the legal foundations of economic inequality in regions of the New World that relied on African or indigenous slavery.
Jorge earned his PhD in Political Science at Columbia University, New York and specialises in comparative politics and historical political economy.
He said: “I feel extremely honoured and grateful.
“I’m truly indebted to my dissertation committee at Columbia University for their helpful comments, and to my family for being an endless source of support during the dissertation-writing process.”
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