Centuries before the demographic transition, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) limited fertility in Western Europe through high celibacy, late age at first marriage, and nuclear household structures. This paper uncovers an institutional factor that shaped the EMP: inheritance customs. We construct a novel atlas of 200 local inheritance customs in pre-industrial France and Belgium and examine individual-level marriage decisions from genealogical records of 53,672 women born in 1670–1750. We document two facts about the EMP: a substantial amount of local variation in its prevalence, and a U-shaped relationship between access to inheritance, women’s economic opportunities, and celibacy. This is consistent with inheritance customs affecting marriage decisions through women’s empowerment and eased financial constraints to form a household. These two channels allow to reconcile conflicting findings on the relationship between the EMP and economic development.

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Co-Authors: Alice Kügler and Uta Schönberg

We investigate the consequences of structural change for workers displaced from the manufacturingsector. Manufacturing establishments traditionally employed low- and high-wage workers in similarproportions and paid substantial wage premiums to both types of workers. Structural change has ledto the disappearance of these jobs, particularly for low-wage workers. Decomposing displacementwage losses, we show that low-wage workers suffer considerable losses in establishment premiumsfollowing displacement, whereas high-wage workers tend to fall down the match quality ladder. Withongoing structural change, losses in wages and establishment premiums have increased over time,especially for low-wage workers, in part because they are increasingly forced to switch to low-knowledge service jobs where establishment premiums are low. Our findings further highlight thatstructural change and layoffs in manufacturing have significantly contributed to job polarization andthe rise in assortative matching of workers to firms.

This paper examines the relationship between wealth inequality and ethnic conflict in the German regions of Czechoslovakia (the so-called Sudetenland) during the interwar period. We utilise unique data on wealth inequality at the county level, along with measures of political preferences and social cleavages from parliamentary elections. We demonstrate that high wealth inequality correlated with increased vote shares for German nationalists. To address possible endogeneity concerns, we employ an instrumental variable approach based on the pre-WWI significance of land in the wealth portfolio across the wealth distribution. We interpret the results within the framework of two-issue political competition where class and ethnic divisions intersect. We hypothesise that the wealthy elites supported nationalists to counter socialist demands.

Co-Authors: Paolo Ghinetti, Simone Moriconi, Costanza Naguib, Michele Pellizzar

We study the choice of acquiring STEM and non-STEM college education using variation inducedby the proximity to universities offering different types of programs. We adopt a novelmethodology allowing the identification of the distribution of response types and treatment effectsin a multiple unordered discrete choice setting (Heckman and Pinto, 2018). The empirical analysisis based on confidential survey data for Italy, combined with administrative information about thefounding dates of all Italian universities and faculties. We find that most compliers are women atthe margin of choosing STEM education versus not going to college. We simulate the effects ofexpanding the supply of STEM education and discover that, in addition to substantial effects onemployment, the gender disparity in STEM education could potentially decrease by up to 20%.

This paper examines the long-term impacts of early childhood pollution exposure by exploiting the sharp decrease in acid rain in Norway after the enactment of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution. We combine a difference-in-differences and a movers' design to analyze the outcomes between cohorts born in municipalities before and after a significant decrease in pollution exposure relative to those same cohorts born in municipalities with little initial exposure. Our findings indicate that higher pollution levels are linked to lower academic performance, with children being most vulnerable to pollution exposure during early childhood.

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