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The objective of this article is to study the links between the financing of primary education, schooling and economic growth in France in the nineteenth century. To do so, we use information on the financing allocated by the State, the departments, the municipalities, and households over the period 1820–1913. Our analysis is in two stages. First, we analyse the evolution of these different types of financing over time, relying on the outliers’ methodology to detect the existence of possible breaks in the series. Next, we study the causal relationships between the different types of financing, the number of children enrolled in primary education and the gross domestic product. Over the period studied, our results confirm that mass schooling is primarily driven by political will, before being explained by the increase in wealth available in the economy.

Our knowledge of the long-run evolution of gender equality is limited. We currently lackquantitative indicators capable of capturing the variations on and changes in the individualdimensions of gender equality. This paper seeks to assess the long-run evolution of gender rolesand relations in Sweden. To this end, we build a database with quantitative indicators of genderequality. These indicators allow us to construct a Historical Gender Gap Index (HGGI), whichis used to describe and analyze the evolution of gender equality in Sweden during a phasecharacterized by industrialization, urbanization and demographic transition. We find that aftera period of stagnation, Sweden from the 1940s onwards made significant progress in closingthe gender gap to reach the high level of gender equality that it is now famous for. All countieshave made substantial improvements in closing the gap over time, although some counties havebeen quicker than others. Our investigation reveals the existence of a convergence patternbetween counties.

Why did France experience the demographic transition first? This question remains one of the greatest puzzles of economics, demography, and economic history. The French pattern is hard to reconcile with elucidations of the process as found in other countries. The present analysis goes back to the roots of the process and offers novel ways of explaining why people started to control their fertility in France and how they did so. In this paper, I track the evolution of marriage patterns to a point before the premises of the demographic transition. I identify three distinct phases. Next, I rely on exploratory methods to classify French counties based on their discriminatory features. Five profiles emerge. I discuss these profiles through the lens of the French Revolution, one of the greatest events that ever occurred in French history, which irretrievably altered its society. In particular, the results show that the fertility transition was not as linear, but more complex than previous research had argued. They show the importance of accounting for cultural factors and for individuals' predispositions to adapt more or less quickly to societal changes. Yet cultural factors are not all. They can help to explain the timing of the transition and the choice of methods used to control fertility, but modernity and gender equality are also needed to describe the mechanisms in play behind the process.

We analyze how much a rational-choice model can explain the temporal and spatial variation in fertility and school enrollment in France during the 19th century. The originality of our approach is in our reliance on a structural estimation technique that exploits the restrictions implied by the first-order conditions to identify the deep parameters. Another new dimension is our use of gendered education data, allowing us to have a richer theory that includes mothers, fathers, boys and girls. Results indicate that the rational-choice model explains 38 percent of the variation of fertility over time and across counties, as well as 71 percent and 83 percent of school enrollment of boys and girls, respectively. The analysis of the residuals (unexplained by the economic model) indicates that additional insights might be gained by considering cross-county differences in family structure and cultural barriers.

Recent theoretical developments of growth models, especially on unified theories of growth, suggest that the child quantity-quality trade-off has been a central element of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to sustained growth. Using an original censusbased dataset, this paper explores the role of gender on the trade-off between education and fertility across 86 French counties during the nineteenth century, as an empirical extension of Diebolt-Perrin (2013). We first test the existence of the child quantity-quality trade-off in 1851. Second, we explore the long-run effect of education on fertility from a gendered approach. Two important results emerge: (i) significant and negative association between education and fertility is found, and (ii) such a relationship is non-unique over the distribution of education/fertility. While our results suggest the existence of a negative and significant effect of the female endowments in human capital on the fertility transition, the effects of negative endowment almost disappear at low level of fertility.

This thesis studies the long-run relationship between gender equality and economic growth. In particular, it aims at understanding and explaining the mechanisms and determinants underpinning the development process which allowed economies to move out of a long period of stagnation into a state of sustainable economic growth. The scientific objective is to check the validity of the central hypothesis that improving equality between men and women is a key ingredient of the demographic transition and of the process of socio-economic development. Quantitative and empirical analysis of this relationship is based on a renewed cliometric approach. Hence we aim at producing a quantitative projection of social sciences in the past, structured by economic theory, mathematical modeling, and informed by statistical and econometric methods. The projected innovation is to build a bridge between the theoretical models of growth and economic history. This new line of research between pure empiricism and abstract theory allows to interpret economic issues taking into account the past and in so doing, to understand more deeply the economic and social historical processes., Cette thèse étudie la relation de long terme entre égalité hommes-femmes et croissance économique. Plus particulièrement, elle vise à comprendre et à expliquer les mécanismes et les déterminants sous-jacents au processus de développement qui a permis aux économies de sortir d’une longue période de stagnation à un état de croissance économique durable. L’objectif scientifique est de vérifier la validité de l’hypothèse que l’amélioration de l’égalité entre hommes et femmes est un ingrédient clef de la transition démographique et du processus de développement socio- économique. L’analyse quantitative et empirique de cette relation est basée sur une approche cliométrique. Cette approche consiste à produire une projection quantitative des sciences sociales dans le passé, structurée par la théorie économique et informée par les méthodes statistiques et économétriques. L’innovation projetée est de construire un pont entre les modèles théoriques de la croissance et l’histoire économique. Cette nouvelle ligne de recherche entre empirisme pur et théorie abstraite permet d’interpréter les questions économiques en tenant compte du passé et, ce faisant, de comprendre plus en profondeur les processus historiques économiques et sociaux.

The Unified Growth Theory is receiving increasing attention from growth theorists since the seminal work of Galor and Weil (1999, 2000). These authors emphasize the need for a unified theory of growth that could account for the transition from Malthusian Stagnation to the Modern Growth Regime (1999). This interest is motivated by the lack of explanation and knowledge regarding the historical evolution of the relationship among population growth, technological change and the standard of living. This paper gives an overview of the Unified Growth Theory, its determinants and its implications., Historical Social Research Vol. 36, No. 3 (2011)