Research

We test Le Play’s (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France's early fertility decline by imposing equal partition of inheritance among all children, including women. We combine new data on local inheritance rules before the Revolution and individual-level demographic data from historical sources and crowdsourced genealogies. Difference-in-differences and regression-discontinuity estimates show that the inheritance reforms enacted during the Revolution reduced completed fertility by 0.5 children. A key mechanism was the desire to avoid land fragmentation across generations. These reforms closed the fertility gap between regions with different historical inheritance rules and crucially contributed to France's demographic transition.

This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women's work in 20th-century Norway. In the 1950s, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace milking cows by hand, a task typically performed by young women. We show that the machines pushed rural young women in dairy-intensive areas out of farming. The displaced women moved to cities where they acquired more education and found better-paying skilled employment. Our results suggest that the adoption of milking machines broke up allocative inefficiencies associated with moving costs across sectors, which improved the economic status of women relative to men.

We have constructed a comprehensive database that traces the publications of father-son pairs in the premodern academic realm and examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence. We find that human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children and that nepotism declined when the misallocation of talent across professions incurred greater social costs. Specifically, nepotism was less common in fields experiencing rapid changes in the knowledge frontier, such as the sciences and within Protestant institutions. Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable.

This article describes the construction and content of an atlas of local jurisdictions of Ancien Régime France: bailliages. Bailliages were at the center of the Ancien Régime's jurisdictional apparatus: they administered the ordinary royal justice, delineated the area of influence of heterogeneous customary laws, and served as electoral constituencies for the Estates General of 1614 and 1789. Yet, their territorial extent was relatively unknown to the royal authority, leading early scholars to assert the impossibility of mapping the geography of bailliages. Based on Armand Brette's Atlas des bailliages et juridictions assimilées published in 1904, we develop a historical geographic information system containing shapefiles and associated data files of bailliage courts at the time of the convocation of the Estates General of 1789. This new source has many potential applications, including mapping the different legal systems that coexisted in France, such as Roman law in pays de droit écrit and customary law in pays de droit coutumier, and studying elections to the Estates General of 1789.

Customary law governed most European societies during the Middle Ages and early modern period. To better understand the roots of legal customs and their implications for long-run development, we introduce an atlas of customary regions of Ancien Régime France. We also describe the historical origins of French customs, their role as a source of law, and their legal content. We then offer some insights into the research possibilities opened by this database. 

I study the relationship between land concentration and the expansion of state education in 19C England. Using a broad range of education measures for 40 counties and 1,387 School Boards, I show a negative association between land concentration and local taxation, school expenditure, and human capital. I estimate reduced-form effects of 19C land concentration, geographic factor endowments, and the land redistribution after the Norman conquest of 1066. The negative effects on state-education supply are stronger where rural labour can easily migrate, where landowners had political power, is not offset by voluntary schooling, and not driven by a demand channel. This suggests that landowners opposed taxation in order to reduce state education provision.

Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, the Season was interrupted (1861-63), raising search costs, and reducing market segregation. I exploit exogenous variation in women's probability to marry during the interruption from their age in 1861. The interruption increased peer-commoner intermarriage by 40% and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30%. Eventually, this reduced peers' political power and affected public policy in late-19C England.

Using genealogical data of British aristocrats, we show that inheritances can affect childlessness. We study settlements, a contract restricting heirs’ powers and settling bequests for yet-to-be-born generations. Settlements reduced childlessness to the ‘natural’ rate, ensuring aristocratic dynasties’ survival. Our estimation exploits that settlements were signed at the heir’s wedding if the family head lived until this date. Whether the heir was born after a girl provides as-good-as-random assignment into settlements. Next, we develop a theory that reproduces our findings, shows that exponential discounting cannot rationalise inheritance systems restricting heirs and that inheritance systems can emerge endogenously when fertility concerns exist. 

Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa is the highest in the world and it should continue boosting population growth for decades to come. In this paper, we showcase a new driver of fertility decisions that has been largely overlooked by demographers and economists: inheritance rules. In particular, we demonstrate that impartible inheritance (i.e. transmission of the deceased's property to a single heir) does not incentivize households to limit their number of children. Our main empirical strategy links data from the past on deep-rooted inheritance customs for more than 800 ethnic groups with modern demographic surveys covering 24 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our spatial Regression Discontinuity Design exploiting ancestral borders reveals that belonging to an ethnic group with impartible inheritance customs increases fertility by 0.85 children per woman. We also establish, both theoretically and empirically, that the fertility differences across inheritance rules are larger in lands that are less labor intensive.

What are the consequences of marrying your cousin? This paper estimates the effects of consanguinity on fertility exploiting genealogical material on the British aristocracy. Identification comes from a unique market failure: As Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, marriage decisions shifted from a central marriage market— the London Season — to local markets populated by blood-related aristocrats. I find that consanguinity increases the number of offspring, but also the time elapsed from marriage to the first birth. The children of consanguineous unions are less likely to reach marriage age, have fewer children, and are 50 percent more likely to be childless.