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.
