Guillaume Blanc
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About me I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Brown with interests in economic growth/history and development, political economy, and applied microeconomics.
I am on the job market this year and available for interviews during the 2021 EJME and 2022 ASSA meetings. You can find my curriculum vitae here. contact: guillaume_blanc(at)brown.edu
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Job Market Papers
Working papers
Schools, Language, and Nations: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in France with Masahiro Kubo (December 2021) [slides]
(Job Market Paper 1)
(Job Market Paper 1)
This paper studies nation-building. We explore the role of state-sponsored education in the adoption of a common language and the formation of a national identity in a fragmented society. At the time of the French Revolution, only ten percent of the population spoke the French language in France. Today, French is the common language. We digitize a detailed survey of the languages spoken across municipalities in France to document the process of homogenization in the nineteenth century. Using a regression discontinuity design, we demonstrate that state-sponsored education brought about the homogenization of language. Then, we study the geographical origins of the French language and the heterogeneous effects of schools. We find that elites and the demand for education were important drivers of homogenization. Finally, we document a persistent impact of nation-building on national identity and preferences for political centralization, with increased participation in the Resistance during World War II and votes against the 1969 referendum on regionalization.
Supplementary materials: online appendix - Presentations at Brown, ENS, UCLA, PSE, Stellenbosch, Cultural Evolution Society, ASREC, NEUDC, European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, Job Market Session North American Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society - Coverage in Broadstreet Blog
The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France (December 2021) [slides]
(Job Market Paper 2)
(Job Market Paper 2)
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 essential condition for development, took hold in France first, before the French Revolution and more than a century earlier than in any other country. Why it happened so early is, according to Robert Darnton, one of the 'big questions of history' because it challenges historical and economic interpretations and because of data limitations at the time. I comprehensively document the decline in fertility and its timing using a novel crowdsourced genealogical dataset. Then, I document an important process of secularization at the time. Using census data available in the nineteenth century, I show a strong association between secularization and the timing of the transition. Finally, I leverage the genealogies to account for unobserved pre-existing, geographic, and institutional differences by studying individuals before and after the onset of the transition and exploiting the choices of second-generation migrants.
Supplementary materials: online appendix - Presentations at Brown, IRES, Clark, UC Louvain, PSE, College de France, Northwestern, PAA, ASREC, LMU, EHA, UC Davis, Chicago - Awarded the Abramson Prize for best third year paper in Brown University Economics - Coverage in Marginal Revolution, The Guardian, Vox.com (The Weeds), Le Point
Demographic Change and Development from Crowdsourced Genealogies in Early Modern Europe (November 2021) [slides]
This paper draws on a novel historical dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies to study demographic change and development at the individual level in the past. I reconstruct fertility series, identify migration in and out of urban centers, and provide novel measures and stylized facts in a period without census and with millions of ordinary individuals observed in thirty countries. For each country in Europe, I carefully show that selection is limited in the data. Then, I document known patterns of human mobility, fertility, and adult mortality using this data. Finally, I present novel findings and stylized facts suggesting that substantial and rapid changes in preferences took hold with the Age of Enlightenment. In particular, I estimate the onset of the decline in fertility in France in the 1760s, a hundred years before the rest of Europe and earlier than previously thought, and I document a weaker intergenerational persistence of fertility in Europe as early as in the late eighteenth century.
Supplementary materials: online appendix - Supplementary figures: selection at the country level for urbanization, fertility, and mortality (see Appendix 1 for the main figures and series by urban status at the country level) - Presentations at Brown, PAA, Oxford, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, IAST-TSE, Zurich*
Publications
Change and Persistence in the Age of Modernization: Saint-Germain-d'Anxure, 1730-1895 with Romain Wacziarg
Explorations in Economic History, Vol 78, October 2020, 10.1016/j.eeh.2020.101352
Explorations in Economic History, Vol 78, October 2020, 10.1016/j.eeh.2020.101352
Awarded the Larry Neal Prize 2021 for best article published in Explorations in Economic History - Coverage in Anderson Review
