The FaMiGrowth Project
The FaMiGrowth project gathers researchers from 16 institutions in Europe and the US. It has the ambition to unravel the links between family formation, migration and economic growth along the European history from 1600 to 1940.
Over the last decades, theories of economic growth have expanded their scope beyond the traditional focus on capital accumulation and technology to emphasize the role of other factors like migration and fertility (Aghion & Howitt, 1998 and Galor, 2011). These two factors have, however, been explored separately, without questioning their interactions. Yet, family formation and migration decisions are strongly intertwined. For instance, the timing of family formation may affect whether an individual migrates or not, and if so where they move or even whether they do so alone or with their spouse and children. Similarly, migration affects women’s fertility, both because husbands may be absent or, when the family moves together, because of the impact of a new location on child-bearing norms or child mortality.
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Despite of the considerable work on migration and families by historians and demographers (e.g. Green, 2002), 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.
Our project aims at answering these questions by providing a clear understanding of the interconnections between individual decisions about family formation, migration and economic activities. The relevance of this approach is twofold. First, quantifying the impact of migration and family formation on European growth requires understanding how these two aspects interact; second, examining those interactions in a historical context can help economists formulate policy recommendations to public stakeholders who need a long-term vision to take informed decisions on migration and social policies today.
One of the main challenges of this research agenda is considering the interconnection between the various phenomena, which makes it difficult to identify and quantify causal links. Our key contribution is the identification of causal relationships by (1) developing a new integrated dataset on family formation and geographical mobility in Europe over the period from 1640 to 1940, and (2) establishing a rigorous identification strategy to understand how family and migration decisions shape economic development. The dataset we intend to develop will rely on crowdsourced genealogical data well suited to study demographic dynamics. These data come from www.geneanet.org and www.geni.com. Preliminary exploration of the raw data indicates that we will be able to follow 700 to 800 million European individuals from birth to death. We will establish their marriage and fertility history through time and space, and therefore their main migratory movements. We will use detailed information to match individual data, first across Geni and Geneanet and secondly between these datasets and nominative census data for a sub-sample of countries in the 19th century. This will allow us to identify the occupation of individuals and to observe migratory episodes between genealogical events. We would hence be able to construct the first pan-European individual panel dataset, following not only individuals over their lifetime but also their lineage across several generations, the European Historical Family Database.
We will develop a global identification strategy based on three powerful elements: (i) the granular observation of individuals through space and time will allow us to use at-the-frontier identification techniques relying on exclusion restrictions provided by quasi-natural experimental settings (Boustan et al., 2012); (ii) the use of family fixed effects will enable us to account for unobserved factors correlated with family origins and genetics of individuals belonging to a common lineage; (iii) the use of indirect inference and especially the Simulated Method of Moments (SMM) will make it possible to capture how factors we cannot directly observe -like the intention to migrate and general equilibrium effects- shape the transmission of the microeconomic behavior measured in WP2 to WP4 to economic growth in Europe.
The Team
The French part of the consortium is composed of researchers from IESEG School of Management (Lille and Paris) and Aix-Marseille School of Management. Overall, the team is composed of a research group and an interdisciplinary advisory board.
Thomas Baudin
Co-PI & General Coodinator
Thomas Baudin is Professor of Economics and Quantitative Methods at IÉSEG School of Management. He is the co-founder of the I-FLAME research center. His domains of research cover population and family economics, growth, migration and economic history. He has contributed to the development of the economic analysis of childlessness.
Cecilia Garcia-Peñalosa
Co-PI
Cecilia García-Peñalosa is Professor of Economics at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics. Since 2017, she has held the chair on Gender, Growth and Development at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She has contributed to the analysis of long-run economic growth, income inequality, and gender inequalities in labour markets.
Simone Moriconi
Co-PI
Simone Moriconi is Professor of Economics at IÉSEG School of Management. He is the founder and current director of the IFLAME Research Center. His domains of research cover public, labor and international economics. He has contributed to the understanding of the relationship between migratory movements and the evolution of political outcomes in Europe.
Yannick Dupraz
Researcher
Yannick Dupraz is a Researcher at CNRS based at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics. He is also a CAGE Research Associate and Research Associate at INED. His domain of expertise cover economic history and development economics. He has contributed to the understanding the long-run processes of economic development, cultural and political change.
Mariya Sakharova
Doctoral Researcher
Mariya Sakharova is a PhD student at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics under the supervision of Cecilia Garcia-Peñalosa. She specializes in Economic History and studies the effect of the polish reform on the process of firm formation in the Tsarist Russian Empire. She will assist Cecilia-Garcia Peñalosa to explore the gender dimension of the FaMiGrowth research project.
Elena Cottini
Researcher
Elena Cottini is Associate Professor at Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. She also serves as Expert advisor for POLISRegione Lombardia on the regional labour market. Her domain of expertise covers labor economics, migration and marriage. She has contributed to the creation of the HIU – HFU Dataset about the History of Italian Universities and History of French Universities.
Paula Gobbi
Researcher
Paula Gobbi is Professor of Economics at Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her domains of expertise cover Demographic Economics, Economic History, Development and Growth. In 2020, she received an ERC Starting Grant to study "Inheritance, Demographics, and Economic Development". She contributed to the advancement of the study of childlessness and family dynamics.
Robert Stelter
Researcher
Robert Stelter is Max Geldner Assistant Professor for Quantitative Economic History/Cliometrics at the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Basel. His domain of expertise covers demography, economic history and economic growth. He has contributed to the advancement of the use of structural estimation designs and genealogical data in social sciences.
Ricardo Turati
Researcher
Ricardo Turati is Assistant Professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. His domains of expertise cover applied economics, international migration , political economy and economic growth. He has contributed to the understanding of the relationship between migratory movements and the evolution of political outcomes in Europe.
Marco Tabellini
Researcher
Marco Tabellini is Professor of Economics at Harvard Business School. His expertise cover economic history, political economy and applied economics with a special focus on migratio. He has contributed to understanding of the political and the economic effects of immigration with a special focus on the Age of Mass Migration to the US.
Adrien Montalbo
Researcher
Adrien Montalbo is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Economics at the University of Sussex. His domains of research cover Economic History, Education Economics, Economic Growth and Political Economy. He has contributed to the studies of important educational reform in 19th century France and their impact on the French economic dynamics.
Jakob Madsen
Researcher
Jakob Madsen is Professor of Economics at the University of Western Australia. His domains of expertise cover macroeconomics, endogenous and unified economic growth, the macroecomics of inequality, history of economic growth, macrofinance, and applied econometrics. He has contributed to the advancement of the understanding of the determinants of growth in the long run.
Paola Giuliano
Advisory Board Member
Paola Giuliano is an economist and the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her domains of expertise Giuliano cover cultural economics, social economics and political economy. She has contributed to the advancement of knowledge related to origins of gender roles and the interactions between culture and institutions.
Nancy Green
Advisory Board Member
Nancy L. Green is an Historian, she is director of research at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her domains of expertise cover comparative history with a special focus on the methods and practices in comparative history with a special focus on contemporary migrations and social history of France and the US in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Sonia Bhalotra
Advisory Board Member
Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. Her domains of expertise cover health, gender and political economy. She has contributed to understanding skill creation, the long run benefits of early life health interventions, maternal and child health and mortality, domestic violence and gender inequality as well as public service provision.
Martha Bailey
Advisory Board Member
Martha Bailey is Professor of Economics at the University of California-Los Angeles. Her research focuses on issues in labor economics, demography and health in the United States, within the long-run perspective of economic history. She is the director of the LIFE-M project, which links millions of vital records with census data for the early 20th century U.S.
David de la Croix
Advisory Board Member
David de la Croix is Professor of Economics at UCLouvain. He is the instigator and editor in-chief of Journal of Demographic Economics. His domains of expertise cover economic growth and history, human capital and population economics. He has contributed to the advancement of knowledge about childlessness, population dynamics, growth and upper-tail human capital.
Giovanni Peri
Advisory Board Member
Giovanni Peri is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He is a Founder and the Director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center. His research focuses on the impact of international migrations on labor markets and productivity of the receiving countries, the determinants of international migrations and the Policies for the integration of migrants and refugees.
Lionel Kesztenbaum
Advisory Board Member
Lionel Kesztenbaum is a demographer and an economist, he his researcher at the Institut National des Etudes Démographiques (INED). His domains of expertise cover demographic history and the history of families. He is the leader of the ANR project Socface which aims at digitizing and analyzing the French historical nominative census from 1836 to 1936.