Research Papers
You can find here the academic publications related to FaMiGrowth. Non academic publications can be found in the media section.
The Emergence of the Child Quantity-Quality Tradeoff - insights from early modern academics
Consider the transition out of a stagnant Malthusian system spearheaded by high-human-capital people. Individuals with a stronger preference for offspring quality may be the first to escape the Malthusian regime and adopt modern fertility behaviours (Galor and Moav 2002). To test this hypothesis, we examine the relationship between family size and human capital among academics in Northern Europe in the two centuries before the Industrial Revolution. We measure the human capital of academics using a novel approach based on their publications. We find that scholars with a higher number of publications than the median shifted from having more siblings to having fewer siblings in the first half of the 18th century. Estimating the parameters of an evolutionary growth model by indirect inference, we show how Malthusian constraints initially led the high human capital families to reproduce more, before being endoge-nously replaced by Beckerian constraints with a tradeoff between child quality and quantity. Our results support an extension of Galor and Moav's (2002) approach, in which the decline of Malthusian constraints is linked to the accumulation of human capital during the 18th
by Thomas Baudin and David de la Croix
Pronatalist Policies’ Backlash in Authoritarian Regimes
by Thomas Baudin and Robert Stelter
European fascist regimes have attached great importance to nationalistic families and designed policies to perpetuate them. Most offered policy packages with interest-free loans repayable through childbirth, along with allowances and tax deductions for large families. Using a difference-in-difference approach and Nazi Germany as a case study, we show that these policies may have counterproductive effects due to negative selection mechanisms in the marriage market. The excessive pressure to marry exerted on singles results in lower quality, ultimately less fertile, and more fragile unions. This finding is important as the main European far-right parties today propose reinstating these policy packages.
Learning from our ancestors:
Using crowdsourced historical data for empirical research
by Nicola Barban, Thomas Baudin, Matthew Curtis, Joseph Enguehard, Paula Gobbi, Simone Moriconi and Robert Stelter
Along recent years, social scientists have developed a strong interest for crowdsourced genealogical data. In this paper, we exploit a unique dataset corresponding to the universe of family trees coming from www.geni.com as they stand in January 2022. We develop a data treatment process allowing to identify and potentially repair data quality issues. We identify a series of important biases affecting the quality of genealogical data and give examples of their severity. Most of the time, these biases refrain from considering genealogical samples as representative samples of populations from the past. Nevertheless, we show that, under some conditions, these biases don't prevent the inference of causal relationships. This result opens the door to new avenues of research in economic history for periods not covered by classical datasources such as censuses.