Economic History

The Customary Atlas of Ancien Régime France

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 …

Urbanization and the Change in Political Elites

This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the …

Revolutionary Transition: Inheritance Change and Fertility Decline

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 …

The Customary Atlas of Ancien Régime France

A historical GIS of customary regions before the Revolution

The Atlas of Local Jurisdictions of Ancien Régime France

A historical GIS of bailliages in 1789

The Atlas of Local Jurisdictions of Ancien Régime France

Weapons of Mass Production. World War I and the Modernization of the French Economy

During the First World War in France, annual government spending reached unprecedented levels, accounting for 50 percent of GDP. A significant portion of these expenditures was allocated to support industrial warfare, at a time when the country’s …

Morts Pour la France: A Database of French Fatalities of the Great War

This article describes the construction and content of the Morts pour la France database.

Caught in the Crossfire: World War I and the Extension of Women’s Suffrage in France

In 1925, of the 22 countries that could be classified as democracies, only four —France, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland— had yet to extend suffrage to women. France is an intriguing exception: as a co-belligerent in WWI, the country experienced …

The Intergenerational Transmission of World War I on Female Labor

The interwar inflow of women in the labor force due to WWI persisted until today through intergenerational transmission mechanisms.