The FaMiGrowth Research Project
FaMiGrowth is a research project funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR) for the years 2024-2029. It aims at understanding and quantifying the contribution of family migration to the process of economic growth and to the take-off of Western Europe. To reach this objective, our team is developing the European Historical Family Database, which merges some of the most important crowdsourced Genealogical Databases and European nominative censuses.
Brief overview
The FaMiGrowth project gathers researchers from 16 institutions in Europe and the US. It has the ambition to unravel the links between family formation and economic growth along the European history from 1600 to 1940. Despite of the considerable work on migration and families by historians and demographers, we do not yet have a systematic economic analysis of how location and family-formation decisions interact at the microeconomic level and what these interactions imply for economic development. In particular, we lack a clear understanding of (Q1) how households members’ decisions to migrate in search of better economic opportunities depend on the ‘stage’ of family formation in which they are, (Q2) how these decisions were shaped by the major economic and social transformations that Europe experienced since the mid-17th century, and (Q3) how family formation and migration decisions contributed to economic growth and development in Western Europe over the last three centuries.