In this paper we examine the share of the French men who exhibit stunted growth during the course of the 19th century. We use data collected on all men who were called up for possible conscription into the French army with the unit of analysis being the shares of 20 year old men in the...

This paper aims to show how the Tra-patrimoine database can be useful to better understand the building, transmission between generations and repartition of the patrimony in France during the last two centuries. We first make a presentation of the sources and, after a discussion on their...

Using large samples of estate tax returns we construct new series on wealth concentration in Paris and France from 1807 to 1994. Wealth concentration in Paris and in France increased until World War I and then fell abruptly. The rise in inequality prior to WWI accelerated (rather than...

Two opposing views of industrialization are commonly expressed. The first emphasizes capitalism’s coercion of workers into furnishing more effort than they had long been accustomed to when they themselves decided the rhythm and timing of work. In this optic, factory discipline is an essential...

Job search models of the labor market establish a very tight correspondance between the determinants of labor turnover and individual wage dynamics on one hand, and the determinants of wage dispersion on the other. This paper offers a systematic examination of wether this correspondance is...

We study the impact of local economic structure on employment dynamics. Local employment is decomposed into the product of the average plant size and the number of plants in the area and industry. We estimate the dynamics of both components simultaneously using French yearly data on 36...