Inheritance Customs and the European Marriage Pattern

Matthew Curtis, Paula Eugenia Gobbi, Marc Goñi and Joanne Haddad

No 2026-30, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Centuries before the demographic transition, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) lim-ited fertility in Western Europe through high celibacy, late marriage, and nuclear households.Whether the EMP reflected female empowerment or instead financial hardship remains de-bated. This paper shows that local inheritance institutions determined where economicopportunity strengthened the EMP and where the EMP reflected poverty. We construct anew atlas of 2,486 rural and urban inheritance customs in France and Belgium and combineit with genealogical data on 75,000 women born between 1500 and 1750. We show that theEMP manifested alongside earning opportunities where inheritance included women andyounger siblings, but that the EMP reflected economic distress where inheritance was ine-galitarian; that effects differed between urban and rural areas; and that they persisted overcenturies. We develop and estimate a structural model in which inheritance rules affectmarriage decisions through female empowerment and financial constraints. The estimatesimply that roughly 65 percent of celibacy reflected choice rather than constraint, suggestingthat the EMP was heterogeneous but primarily a positive force for female empowerment.

Keywords: European Marriage Pattern; Celibacy; Customs; Inheritance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J10 K11 N33 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 121 p.
Date: 2026-09-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-his
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