Inheritance, Demographics, and Economic Development

Project Information

IDED

Grant agreement ID: 947654

DOI

10.3030/947654

EC signature date 3 August 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 December 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 376 916,00

EU contribution

€ 1 376 916,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - IDED (Inheritance, Demographics, and Economic Development)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Both inheritance and family decisions are essential aspects of an individual's life. They influence economic opportunities, inequalities, and ultimately welfare.

The project IDED studies how inheritance rules and laws affect economic development by shaping the demographics of local societies.
The project makes a bridge between two unconnected pieces of literature in economics. The first studies the effects of inheritance on the economy, and the second studies the linkages between economics and demographics. Although most social scientists acknowledge the "iron chain" that exists between inheritance and demographics, economists have abstracted from such connections.

The first objective of the project aims to create new databases on the rules that regulated inheritance during the eighteenth century in Europe. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marked a turning point in the history of inheritance laws as most European countries incorporate a civil code at the national level. Civil codes replaced all the local customs that had regulated most domains of family law (including inheritance) since the tenth century. This first milestone is ambitious because several layers of mapping are involved before reaching a map of different inheritance laws in a given country prior to the incorporation of a national civil code --i.e. judicial constituency borders, customary borders, and finally inheritance rules.
The second objective is to connect the new database on inheritance with historical demographic data. For this, we rely on both scientifically recognized databases in terms of their quality, complemented with a large database on family genealogies, which despite their biases can be used to study more dimensions. From these new maps and data, a third milestone is establishing new facts on how inheritance rules affect marital, fertility, and education decisions. Several hypotheses in social sciences exist on the linkages between non-egalitarian inheritance and higher fertility, or no access to inheritance and celibacy, but the lack of data has always made it hard to test them. The database constructed allows us to provide new facts, exploiting past European societies that showed ample geographical variation across both inheritance rules and demographics. I also compare these new facts with modern Sub-Saharan Africa data. Finally, I propose new ways of rationalizing them from an economic perspective.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the first half of the project, we have made the following achievements.

The first question of the project was whether the inheritance reforms of the French Revolution were responsible for the demographic transition. The passage from non-egalitarian to egalitarian systems of inheritance is the eldest hypothesis regarding the drivers of the French demographic transition, the first in the world and still a puzzle for social scientists. Our new database on inheritance allows us to test this hypothesis. We show that the harmonization of inheritance rules towards more egalitarian rules was indeed responsible for an acceleration (but not the launching) of the French fertility transition. We also show that places that had different inheritance systems prior to the revolution also showed different fertility rates. Such differences disappeared when inheritance laws were harmonized.

Secondly, the project asked how the characteristics of the European Marriage Pattern –late marriages and high life-long celibacy– varied across inheritance systems. In theory, access to inheritance can either increase or decrease the likelihood of remaining single. With the new data on inheritance rules and celibacy, we show that access to inheritance decreases the likelihood of remaining single only among the poorest women. For women who had other economic opportunities, access to inheritance allowed them to have a better choice between marrying or remaining single. These results are in line with the modern hump-shaped relationship between marriage and income for women. Results suggest that access to inheritance can empower women when they are accompanied by economic opportunities.

The project also asked in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa’s demographic transitions, whether the harmonization towards more egalitarian inheritance practices could reactivate stalling demographic transitions. Using ethnographic data merged with modern demographic data, we show that the same relationships between non-egalitarian inheritance rules and higher fertility that we found in the French context of the eighteenth century still exist in sub-Saharan Africa. We also show that the importance of land as a factor of production is key to understanding the differences across the inheritance systems: when the production is more land-intensive than labor-intensive, differences in fertility across inheritance systems are more pronounced.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The new findings relating inheritance with fertility and marriage decisions in the context of historical Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa go beyond the state of the art. The new databases on the judicial constituencies, customs, and inheritance rules for France and Belgium in the Early Modern Period will serve the scientific community to study other effects of inheritance rules as well as how these originate. The usage of genealogical data in historical demography is also challenging and the project proposes new methodologies to ensure proper usage that also go beyond the state-of-the-art.

Until the end of the project, the project still aims to: (i) expand the database on inheritance in historical Europe to other countries, (ii) include the customs of cities above those of judicial constituencies, (iii) explore further effects of inheritance on education choices and inequalities, (iv) propose a methodological paper on how to use genealogical data for research in historical demographics, (v) look at the effects of historical inheritance reforms on the decisions of elites.