During World War I, annual government spending in France reached unprecedented levels, accounting for 50 percent of prewar GDP. A significant portion of this spending was allocated to support war industries at a time when the country’s industrial …
This article introduces POPPocc, a harmonized occupational dataset built from the nominative population censuses of Paris for 1926, 1931, and 1936--the POPP database. Drawing on 8.5 million individual records, we standardize highly heterogeneous …
Combining district-level measures of World War I military fatalities with full-count census microdata, we show that wartime mortality increased postwar female labor force participation in England and Wales. Women shifted away from traditionally …
This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between candidates' occupation and their electoral success. To identify the causal effect of local variation in urbanization, we exploit exogenous changes in the boundaries of electoral …
The gabelle salt tax system was a cornerstone of the fiscal apparatus of the early modern French state. This article introduces a novel historical geographic information system (GIS) of this institution's spatial organization as of the seventeenth …
Early modern European powers were beset by episodic unrest as they sought to consolidate authority and build empires. We examine how growing state communication networks and the penetration of society impacted unrest by combining original and …
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 …
Empirical research in historical demography is usually time-consuming and labour-intensive. Recent developments in machine learning offer new possibilities for building very large databases with reduced time and costs, though …
We study how World War I's demographic shock reshaped women's work in rural France. Linking women across the 1911 and 1921 censuses in the département of Haute-Vienne and exploiting commune-level variation in military fatalities, we estimate how male …