Professor Saleh is a Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is also a Research Affiliate in Economic History at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Faculty Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), and a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum (ERF). He obtained his PhD in Economics in May 2012 from the University of Southern California (USC).

Professor Saleh's primary fields of interest lie at the intersection of Economic History, Political Economy, and Development Economics. He has been interested in two main themes of research. The first theme is the Economic History of Identity, and in particular how fiscal policy impacted the formation of religious groups, their socioeconomic outcomes, and their narratives, via tax-induced conversions. The second theme is Historical Political Economy, and in particular, coercion of labor, forced migration, land inequality, and historical roots of political authoritarianism. Professor Saleh's research has been published in leading Economics, Economic History, and Political Science journals, such as Econometrica, American Political Science Review, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Development Economics, Explorations in Economic History, and Economic History Review. He was awarded the Economic History Association’s Arthur H. Cole Prize for the best Journal of Economic History article of the year in 2017–2018. He was awarded two best article awards from the American Political Science Association in 2021 and 2022.

Professor Saleh's research has been focused on the Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa, where he employs modern econometric methods, historical evidence, and novel primary data sources to address long-standing questions in the field. He digitized two nationally representative individual-level samples from Egypt's population censuses in 1848 and 1868, from the original Arabic census manuscripts at the National Archives of Egypt. These censuses are the earliest censuses in the Middle East and North Africa to enumerate every individual, including females, children, and slaves. They are also among the earliest individual-level precolonial censuses from any non-Western country. Professor Saleh published these two census samples on IPUMS International in 2021. 

Recent or select publications 

Hartnett, Allison S. and M. Saleh (2025). Precolonial Elites and Colonial Redistribution of Political Power. Forthcoming at American Political Science Review. 

Saleh, M. (2024). Trade, Slavery, and State Coercion of Labor: Egypt during the First Globalization Era. Journal of Economic History 84, no.4: 1107-1141.

Artunç, C. and M. Saleh (2024). The Demand for Extraterritoriality: Religious Minorities in Nineteenth Century Egypt. Economic History Review 77, no. 3: 895-927. 

Kumon, Y. and M. Saleh (2023). The Middle-Eastern Marriage Pattern? Malthusian Dynamics in Nineteenth Century Egypt. Economic History Review 76 (4): 1231--1258.       

Assaad, R., T. Ginn, and M. Saleh (2023). Refugees and the Education of Host Populations: Evidence from the Syrian Inflow to Jordan. Journal of Development Economics 164: 103131.

Saleh, M. and J. Tirole (2021). Taxing Identity: Theory and Evidence from Early Islam. Econometrica 89 (4):1881–1919

Saleh, M. (2018). On the Road to Heaven: Taxation, Conversions, and the Coptic-Muslim Socioeconomic Gap in Medieval Egypt. Journal of Economic History 78 (2): 394–434.

Lévêque, C. and M. Saleh (2018). Does Industrialization Affect Segregation? Evidence from Nineteenth Century Cairo. Explorations in Economic History 67: 40–61.

Saleh, M. (2016). Public Mass Modern Education, Religion, and Human Capital in Twentieth-Century Egypt. Journal of Economic History 76 (3): 697–735.

Saleh, M. (2015). The Reluctant Transformation: State Industrialization, Religion, and Human Capital in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. Journal of Economic History 75 (1): 65–94.

Saleh, M. (2013). A Pre-Colonial Population Brought to Light: Digitization of the Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Censuses. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 46(1): 5–18. 

Curriculum Vitae

You can read Professor Saleh's CV here: Mohamed Saleh CV