Inheritance, Demographics, and Economic Development
Project funded by the European Union (ERC, IDED, project number 947654). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Economists study inheritance and demographics in isolation, overlooking the feedback effects between the two. This is surprising given that other social scientists have typically related inheritance schemes to family structures. The general objective of this research is to understand the implications of these interconnections for the process of economic development.
First, I will create new databases for European countries between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, and for Sub-Saharan African countries during the past century until today. These databases will enable us to establish facts relating inheritance schemes, family structures and demographic variables. Second, I will propose structural models of inheritance, family structures, marriage and fertility in order to rationalize these facts.
These models will assess the importance of the relationship between inheritance and demographics when studying the effect of inheritance on economic outcomes. The databases and structural models will provide answers to specific applied research questions: (i) The Demographic Transition: Was the French Revolution responsible for the demographic transition? What were the relevant channels (partible inheritance and inclusion of women)? How did the abolition of primogeniture affect the elites’ demographic transition? (ii) The European Marriage Pattern: how did its characteristics – late marriages and high life-long celibacy – vary across inheritance systems? Which one of these was most beneficial for gender empowerment? (iii) Sub-Saharan Africa’s demographic transitions: Can the harmonization of inheritance practices reactivate stalling demographic transitions? How does land scarcity affect the relationship between inheritance practices, family structures, and demographics?
Ongoing research projects:
Revolutionary transition: Inheritance change and fertility decline (with Victor Gay and Marc Goñi).
Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of Inheritance (with Sébastien Fontenay and Marc Goñi).
Inheritance Customs, the European Marriage Pattern, and Female Empowerment (with Matthew Curtis, Marc Goñi, and Joanne Haddad).
Inheritance Customs and Knowledge Production in Pre-industrial Europe (with David de la Croix and Victor Gay).
Long-term consequences of inheritance rules for the housing market (with Guillaume Chapelle and Gerard Domènech-Arumí).
Data papers projects:
The Customary Atlas of Early Modern France (with Victor Gay and Marc Goñi). Dataverse.
The Atlas of Judicial Constituencies of Ancien Régime France (with Victor Gay and Marc Goñi). Dataverse.
Learning from our ancestors: Using crowdsourced historical data for empirical research (with Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Thomas Baudin, Matthew Curtis, and Simone Moriconi)
Publications
The Atlas of Judicial Constituencies of Ancien Régime France. Accepted at the Journal of Historical Geography [with Victor Gay and Marc Goñi]. Dataverse.
The Customary Atlas of Ancien Régime France. Accepted at Explorations in Economic History [with Victor Gay and Marc Goñi]. Dataverse.
Economics and Family Structures. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance. Oxford University Press. March 2023. [with Thomas Baudin and Bram De Rock]
Media coverage and links to presentations:
Link to the presentation at the conference "Our Global Economy: How to Move from Inequality to Shared Prosperity?" (Brussels, Dec. 14th 2024), Minutes 45-1:30.
Article "Liberté, égalité, fécondité" in Héritage L'Ultime Tabout, Politique n. 124.
See Eric Fabri presenting the issue in + d'Actu .
10/11/2022: TV debate in "La Trois" (Déclic) with Bruno Masquelier, Philippe van Parijs, Geraldine Thiry, and Olivier De Schutter. Presented by Julie Morelle and Arnaud Ruyssen.
17/02/2022: TV Interview in "Pour Info" at LN24 presented by Julien Bal.
Article in Moustique by Catherine Ernens.
Related publications:
Childless Aristocrats. Inheritance and the extensive margin of fertility. The Economic Journal, 131(637):2089-2118, 2021. [with Marc Goñi]