Religious freedom has become an emblematic value in the West. Embedded in constitutions
and championed by politicians and thinkers across the political spectrum, it is to many an …

This paper studies when religion can hamper diffusion of knowledge and economic
development, and through which mechanism. I examine Catholicism in France during the …

Retrospective questions from recent surveys let us estimate rates of church attendance
among children and their parents in ten Western democracies throughout most of the 20th …

Human capital is now widely acknowledged as one of the key determinants of economic
growth. Research on how human skills accumulate and evolve through time has grown …

This research explores the effect of early industrialisation on human capital formation.
Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France …

This research shows that secularization accounts for the early decline in fertility in
eighteenth-century France. The demographic transition, a turning point in history and an …

Public schooling systems are an essential feature of modern states. These systems often
developed at the expense of religious schools, which undertook the bulk of education …

This article offers an explanation for the convergence of fertility rates across French
départements in the second half of the 19th century that emphasises the diffusion of …

Educational institutions not only build human capital; they also shape culture. We present a
model of cultural dynamics produced by cultural transmission through the education system …

We analyze how much a core rational-choice model can explain the temporal and spatial
variation in fertility and school enrollment in France during the 19th century. The originality of …