European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics

Lorenzo Cicatiello (Assistant Professor in Economics at theDepartment of Human and Social Sciences of the University of Naples,IT) will present : 

"Authority, awareness and discretion in FOI, evidencefrom a field experiment"

Abstract | Poster 
*Pleasecontact Helene.Bertaux@ulb.be if you wish to participate (lunch is provided soplease confirm your presence max. one week before the event).

Title: The New Regime of the Family - PersistentEffects of French Customary Law on the Gender Wealth Gap, 1791-1870

Abstract: The French Revolution and successive politicalregimes replaced the patchwork of French customary law with universal civillaw. This was also a conscious effort to implement a new regime of the family.The customary practice of the dowry, however, was not abolished by the CodeNapoléon. Based on the Customary Atlas of Ancien Régime Franceassembled by Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi (2024), and using newly collected data onwealth at death, I estimate the persistent effects of customs regarding dowrieson the gender wealth gap. 
Pre-revolutionary patterns regarding dowries arelikely to have been persistent since dowries were explicitly allowed under the CodeCivil. Since husbands could not freely sell ormortgage dowry property unless permitted in a marriage contract,the dowry protected the capital of the wife’s family investment.After the end of a marriage – either through death or divorce –the dowry was restored to the wife or her heirs. This means that theinequality between men and women must have been lower in areas with dowriesbefore the introduction of the Code Civil. I document the persistence ofthis pattern by looking at areas on the border between different customaryareas, employing a regression-discontinuity design. 
The data used for this project has beencollected as part of a joint project with Aurelius Noble. We usestate-of-the-art open-source document processing and text recognition methodsto digitise large parts of the available Tables des Successions et Absences.These contain information on the estate tax. This is a unique source since itcontains information on groups that are often excluded from fiscal sources fromthe period – notably women and poor. Our dataset encompasses the period1791-1870 and currently consists of data for 20 départements, giving us roughly2 million observations on individual-level wealth at death. We are working onexpanding it.