[draft] - [EHA poster]
Under revision - last update: November 24, 2006
(This is my Job Market paper)

Recent developments in endogenous growth theory suggest that fertility decline in the context of demographic transition matters to achieve long term economic growth and vice versa. Yet France, the first clear case of fertility decline in Europe, seems to have escaped this dynamic. The long-term evolution of birth rates places the onset of the French decline somewhere around 1800, more than 50 years before other regions and when France was still far from becoming industrialised. This fall was nevertheless not homogenous throughout the country and some regions maintained high rates quite late in the nineteenth century. In fact, variation in the average levels of fertility among départements reached its peak in the last third of that century. I take advantage of this diversity within France to e xplore which local characteristics contribute to explain the different levels of fertility in each region. From various sources, I collected and put together a panel of département level data for the last quarter of the nineteenth century and study the correlates of fertility using a fixed-effects model. Preliminary results confirm the importance of some of the forces suggested by standard fertility choice models. Nevertheless, certain non-economic factors (such as secularisation) for which I provide new measurements also appear to play a considerable role in explaining the variation across département.

[draft]
Under revision - last update: September 29, 2006

In this paper I assess quantitatively some characteristics of the long-tern dynamics of French fertility decline. I use time-series analysis to evaluate whether the Malthusian framework is still valid in this specific demographic transition. In particular, I look at the long-run equilibrium between fertility, mortality and income, and the short-run dynamics that govern that same equilibrium. The results I obtain suggest that despite the fact that a long-run equilibrium seems to be maintained between variables, their short-run influence changed radically over time.

The decline of fertility in France during the nineteenth century exhibited a very distinctive geographical pattern. All throughout the period one could see at least two areas of low fertility (the Seine valley and the Aquitaine region) spreading while two ‘islands’ of high fertility (Bretagne and the Massif Central) kept shrinking. Standard quantitative analyses can shed some light into the factors driving this diffusion, but to understand the mechanisms underlying its dynamics we probably need other tools. In this work we apply two alternative ones. On the one hand, we use spatial econometrics to model the geographical dimension of the diffusion process. On the other, we build an agent-based simulation to assess the variations in diffusion patterns when driven by different behavioural assumptions and supported by different network topologies. By integrating both approaches, we aim to attain a more thorough understanding of the factors that played a role in the evolution of French fertility.

This research project is aimed at explaining why the organisation of some local administrations in the United States resembles that of private enterprises while in others chief executives (elected politicians) have decided to bureaucratise it, delegating the powers to hire, fire, and promote public employees to autonomous bodies (Civil Service Commissions). We trace the geographical expansion of these later bodies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and build a model to understand under which circumstances self-interested politicians will bureaucratise their public administrations. With a newly collected panel dataset we also test the main existing hypothesis in the literature (i.e. that elected local officials bureaucratised their administrations due to “patronage pressure” from white immigrant groups) in an innovative way: by considering both the increase in demand for patronage and the change its “supply” (i.e. offices available for patronage).

I have recently been collecting diverse series of prices and wages for various North- and South-American cities from colonial times to the mid-nineteenth century with the aim of creating a set of real wages series. These could shed some light on the evolution of standards of living in that continent during the colonial period, and allow us to compare those results with the work done on other parts of the world and with alternative measures of well-being, such as those provided by the anthropometric literature.

[Before the Metre Project]