[2] Stasavage carries out data driven research on the historical development of state institutions including Western Europe and Africa.

He has written on topics including democracy, political economy, development economics, public credit, central banks, education policy, welfare, and income inequality.

[1] In Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Stasavage modeled connections between public debt and representative assemblies and their relationships with the fiscal credibility of governments in the eighteenth century.

[5] In States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Polities (Princeton University Press, 2011)[6] he further examined the development of representative assemblies and of public borrowing in Europe, during the medieval and early modern eras.

[10] In The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2020) he takes an institutional approach to the interaction of state and societal actors, to identify and examine the development of both early and modern democracies.