Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP18607
Authors: Victor Gay; Paula Eugenia Gobbi; Marc Goi
Abstract: We test Le Play's (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France’s early fertility decline. In 1793, a series of inheritance reforms abolished local inheritance practices, imposing equal partition of assets among all children. We develop a theoretical framework that predicts a decline in fertility following these reforms because of indivisibility constraints in parents' assets. We test this hypothesis by combining a newly created map of pre-Revolution local inheritance practices together with demographic data from the Henry database and from crowdsourced geneaologies in Geni.com. We provide difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity estimates based on comparing cohorts of fertile age and cohorts too old to be fertile in 1793 between municipalities where the reforms altered and did not alter existing inheritance practices. We find that the 1793 inheritance reforms reduced completed fertility by half to one child, closed the pre-reform fertility gap between different inheritance regions, and sharply accelerated France’s early fertility transition.
Keywords: demographic transition; fertility; inheritance
JEL Codes: D10; J10; K11; N33; O10
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| 1793 inheritance reforms (K36) | economic incentives (M52) |
| completed fertility (J13) | fertility gap closure (J13) |
| completed fertility (J13) | fertility transition (J13) |
| fertility gap closure (J13) | fertility transition (J13) |
| 1793 inheritance reforms (K36) | completed fertility (J13) |
| economic incentives (M52) | completed fertility (J13) |