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Victor Gay
Assistant Professor of Economics
Toulouse School of Economics
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Université Toulouse Capitole
Current Positions
- Assistant Professor of Economics, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Toulouse School of Economics
- Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Research fields Economic history, political economy, labor economics.
PhD in Economics, The University of Chicago, 2018
Upcoming talks
- April 12: World War I and Female Labor Force Participation. The Case of England and Wales (with B. Milner) @ EHS Annual Conference
- April 3: roundtable participant @ Open it! Open data and open-access publications: for a shared science.
- March 30: Weapons of Mass Production. World War I and the Modernization of the French Economy (with A. Alonzo and R. Tallec) @ Paris-Dauphine
- March 27: Weapons of Mass Production. World War I and the Modernization of the French Economy (with A. Alonzo and R. Tallec) @ TSE
- March 23: Evaluating SocFace against manual methods. Female labor in Haute-Vienne and the First World War (with L. Kesztenbaum) @ Journée ANR SocFace
Recent talks
- March 13: Data Papers in the Social Sciences. A Practitioner’s Perspective on Best Practices @ Les 30 ans de Cybergeo: 1996-2026
- March 12: Weapons of Mass Production. World War I and the Modernization of the French Economy (with A. Alonzo and R. Tallec) @ IÉSEG
- February 6: The Jean Nicolas Database. The French Rebellion, 1661-1789 @ Archives Henri-Poincaré
Working Papers
(2026).
Mapping the Grandes Gabelles in Early Modern France.
TSE Working Paper 26-1716.
(2025).
Urbanization and Electoral Success: Lawyers and Workers in Interwar France.
CEPR Discussion Paper 18737. Updated version: August 2025.
(2025).
The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics.
NBER Working Paper 33729. Revision requested at the Journal of Economic Literature.
Journal Articles
(2026).
POPP. An OCR-Generated Database of the Population Censuses of Paris (1926-1936).
Historical Life Course Studies, 16, 3-28.
(2025).
State-Building and Rebellion in the Run-Up to the French Revolution.
Forthcoming at the American Political Science Review.
(2025).
The Jean Nicolas Database. The French Rebellion, 1661-1789.
Data & Corpus, 1, 15892.
(2025).
Revolutionary Transition: Inheritance Change and Fertility Decline.
Forthcoming at the Journal of Political Economy.
(2025).
The Mosque Nearby. Visible Minorities and Far-Right Support in France.
Comparative Political Studies, 58(9), 2000-48.
(2024).
The Atlas of Local Jurisdictions of Ancien Régime France.
Journal of Historical Geography, 84, 49-60.
(2024).
The Customary Atlas of Ancien Régime France.
Explorations in Economic History, 93, 101588.
(2023).
Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility. A Verification and Reproduction of Fernández and Fogli (2009).
Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, 2, 1-15.
(2023).
Morts Pour la France: A Database of French Fatalities of the Great War.
Explorations in Economic History, 90, 101550.
(2023).
The Intergenerational Transmission of World War I on Female Labor.
The Economic Journal, 133(654), 2303-33.
(2023).
Distance to Innovations, Kinship Intensity, and Psychological Traits.
PLoS ONE, 18(1), e0279864.
(2022).
The Missing Men. World War I and Female Labor Force Participation.
Journal of Human Resources, 57(4), 1209-41.
(2021).
Mapping the Third Republic. A Geographic Information System of France (1870–1940).
Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 54(4), 189-207.
(2019).
No Better Time Than Now. Future Uncertainty and Private Investment Under Dictatorship.
Economics & Politics, 31(1), 71-96.
(2018).
Decomposing Culture. An Analysis of Gender, Language, and Labor Supply in the Household.
Review of Economics of the Household, 16(4), 879-909.
(2017).
Unlikely Democrats. Economic Elite Uncertainty under Dictatorship and Support for Democratization.
American Journal of Political Science, 61(3), 624-41.
(2013).
Do Female/Male Distinctions in Language Matter? Evidence from Gender Political Quotas.
Applied Economics Letters, 20(5), 495-8.
Book Chapters
(2025).
Un data paper en SHS : pourquoi, pour qui, comment ? [A data paper in the social sciences: why, for whom, how?].
In C. Kosmopoulos and J. Schopfel (Eds.), Publier, partager, réutiliser les données de la recherche : les data papers et leurs enjeux, 66-74. Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.
(2025).
La mesure du travail des femmes dans les recensements de la population au tournant du 20e siècle [Measuring women's labor in the population censuses at the turn of the twentieth century].
In A. Trannoy and A. Virmani (Eds.), Économistes et historiens, dialogue de sourds ?, 65-78. Paris: Odile Jacob.
(2016).
Language and Gender Roles among Immigrants to the U.S. A Historical Perspective.
In P. Paolini (Ed.), I Mondi Delle Donne, 165-79. Roma: Edi Cusano.
Conference Proceedings
(2023).
Espaces construits par la puissance publique et espaces vécus par les justiciables dans le royaume de France (1661-1789) [Constructed spaces by public authorities and experienced spaces by litigants in the Kingdom of France (1661-1789)].
In Actes du congrès de la Fédération historique de la région Occitanie, in press.
(2022).
Graphes de connaissances pour représenter et analyser l'évolution des territoires en histoire [Knowledge graphs for representing and analyzing the evolution of territories in history].
In Nicolas Lasolle, Olivier Bruneau, and Jean Lieber (Eds.), Actes des journées humanités numériques et Web sémantique, 23-37. Nancy, France.
(2016).
Migration As A Window Into The Coevolution Between Language And Behavior.
In S.G. Roberts et al. (Eds.), The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (EVOLANG 11), 1-8.
Non Peer-Reviewed Publications
(2025).
Paris 100 Years Ago: More People than Today—and Mostly Born Elsewhere .
Population & Sociétés, 636, 1-4.
(2022).
ObARDI : un projet interdisciplinaire pour comprendre la construction de l'État moderne (1661-1789) [ObARDI: an interdisciplinary project to understand the construction of the Modern State (1661-1789)].
Les Cahiers de Framespa, 41, 1-12.
(2019).
Review of Roger L. Ransom (2018) Gambling on War : Confidence, Fear and the Tragedy of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reviewed for EH.net.
(2013).
The Grammatical Origins of Gender Roles.
Berkeley Economic History Laboratory Working Paper 2013-03.
Teaching
Dissertation
(2018).
The Legacy of the Missing Men: World War I and Female Labor in France Over a Century.
Defended at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago. Committee: Richard Hornbeck (chair), Steven D. Levitt, Derek A. Neal, and James A. Robinson.
Contact
- victor.gay@tse-fr.eu
- T.458, 1 Esplanade de l'Université
31080 Toulouse