Guillaume Blanc
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About me I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Brown with interests in economic history, growth and development, political economy, and cultural economics.
In August 2022, I will be joining the University of Manchester as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. You can find my curriculum vitae here. contact: guillaume_blanc(at)alumni.brown.edu
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Working papers
Demographic Change and Development Using Crowdsourced Genealogies (April 2022) [PDF] [slides] [twitter thread]
This research draws on a novel historical dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies on geni.com to study demographic change and development in the past. Using millions of lineages of ordinary individuals in Europe, I reconstruct fertility, identify migration in and out of urban centers, and provide novel measures and stylized facts in periods without census. I carefully show that selection into the data is limited from the mid-seventeenth century onwards by systematically comparing fertility, mortality, and urbanization in the genealogies to census or representative data in thirty different countries. Then, as an illustration of what can be done, I document known patterns of demographic change and development using the genealogies. Finally, I present novel findings and stylized facts showing that substantial distributional and secular changes took hold in the eighteenth century, during the early stages of the transition from stagnation to growth.
Supplementary materials: online appendix & data (available soon) - Supplementary figures: selection at the country level for urbanization, fertility, and mortality (also in Appendix 2) - Presentations: Brown, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Oxford, PAA, TSE, Zurich, NBER SI, WEHC
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: 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, Aix-Marseille, EIEF, CREI, UC3M, NES, RES, SIOE
The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France (December 2021) [PDF] [slides] [twitter thread]
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: Brown, IRES, Clark, UC Louvain, PSE, College de France, Northwestern, PAA, ASREC, LMU, EHA, UC Davis, Chicago, Manchester, RES, Pompeu Fabra, European Parliament in Madrid - Awarded: Abramson Prize for best third year paper in Brown University Economics - Coverage: Marginal Revolution, The Guardian, Vox.com (The Weeds), Le Point, Uncharted Territories, El Mundo
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: Larry Neal Prize 2021 for best article published in Explorations in Economic History - Coverage: Anderson Review
