Only Time Will Tell
Revolutionary Transition: Inheritance Change and Fertility Decline
Victor Gay, Paula Gobbi & Marc Goñi
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We test Le Play’s (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France’s early fertility decline by imposing equal partition of inheritance among all children, including women. We combine new data on local inheritance rules before the Revolution and individual-level demographic data from historical sources and crowdsourced genealogies. Difference-in-differences and regression-discontinuity estimates show that the inheritance reforms enacted during the Revolution reduced completed fertility by 0.5 children. A key mechanism was the desire to avoid land fragmentation across generations. These reforms closed the fertility gap between regions with different historical inheritance rules and crucially contributed to France’s demographic transition.
The effects of parental education on male mortality: Evidence from the first wave of compulsory schooling laws
Hamid Noghanibehambari, Vikesh Amin & Jason Fletcher
Journal of Population Economics, November 2025
Abstract:
This paper investigates the causal impact of fathers’ education on sons’ longevity by linking the full count 1940 US census to Social Security Administration death records and using the first wave of compulsory schooling laws from 1875 to 1912 as instruments for education. OLS estimates suggest small protective effects -- conditional on children surviving until age 35, an extra year of fathers’ education increases sons’ age at death by 0.75 months. IV estimates are substantially larger, with an extra year of a father’s education increasing his son’s age at death by 5.6 months. We also find that an extra year of fathers’ education increases sons’ education by 0.22 years, conditional on children surviving till 16 years. This suggests that intergenerational transmission of human capital is a channel linking fathers’ education to children’s longevity. In addition, we find significant improvements in sons’ occupational status associated with higher paternal education, indicating that occupational mobility is another important pathway through which parental education improves long-term health and longevity.
Geopolitics and Export Miracles: Firm-Level Evidence from U.S. War Procurement in Korea
Philipp Barteska et al.
University of Oxford Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
How did geopolitics shape East Asia's economic development? We show that U.S. war procurement during the Vietnam War-a shock equivalent to 2.9% of South Korea's GDP, rivaling the Marshall Plan-catalyzed the country's export-led industrialization. We construct a new firm-level dataset linking Korean export records with U.S. procurement contracts (1966-1974) to estimate the causal impact of winning a contract on export performance. Winning an initial contract increases a firm's likelihood of exporting by 46 percentage points and triples its export value. These effects extend beyond sales to the United States: treated firms also expanded into third-country markets. We validate our research design using unique, contemporaneous firm-level export targets, showing that contracts were not anticipated and unrelated to export shocks. The policy had lasting effects. We find that firms treated in the 1960s responded more strongly to South Korea's heavy and chemical industry drive of the 1970s, indicating that U.S. procurement and domestic industrial policy were complementary. Our findings reveal a neglected channel through which Cold War geopolitics helped shape the East Asian economic miracle.
Colors of Growth
Lars Boerner et al.
ETH Zurich Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higher frequency fluctuations -- such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks -- that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
Bridges
Anna Tompsett
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Bridges are critical but sparse links in land transport networks. I exploit quasi-experimental variation in bridge construction over major rivers in the United States to measure the causal effects of land transport infrastructure. Bridges are more often built upstream than downstream of tributary confluences -- where smaller rivers join larger rivers -- generating local differences in connectivity. These local connectivity advantages have negative effects on per capita income. In contrast, major changes in connectivity arising from the opening of major bridges increase per capita economic activity. A narrative explanation that can reconcile both results is that land transport infrastructure creates productivity advantages that drive economic growth, structural transformation, and urbanization over large spatial scales. Local sorting within the cities that form around early transport routes then reverses this gradient over smaller spatial scales.