Lionel Kesztenbaum

Vive la différence? Intergenerational Mobility in France and the United States during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Although rates of intergenerational mobility are the same in the United States and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution, which should reflect those ratesat least in partdiffer substantially. An examination of the differences in mobility between the United States and France since the middle of the nineteenth century, based on data for both countries that permit a comparison between the socioeconomic status of fathers and that of sons throughout a period of thirty years, demonstrates that the United States was a considerably more mobile economy in the past, though such differences are far from apparent today.

'The true social molecule'. Industrialization, paternalism and the family. Half a century in Le Creusot (1836-86)

There is little doubt that both urbanization and industrialization changed the way people live and interact. However, even though family structure has long been considered as the best indicator of the changes induced, little is known, empirically, about its evolution. We take advantage of a large dataset of matched censuses in a fast industrializing city to investigate how families function in a new environment. We show that family formation confronted two structural forces: the sheer numbers of migrants and the company that dominated the labor market. The company tried to promote a new family model by allowing only some kinds of migrants, selected through housing and labor, to settle in the city. Many aspects of their lives were thus constrained by the firms paternalistic organization. This process did not occur without resistance but it contributed to the integration of migrants in the city of Le Creusot.

Intergenerational Wealth Mobility in France, 19th and 20th Century

This paper examines intergenerational wealth mobility between fathers and children in France between 1848 and 1960. Considering wealth mobility in the long run requires taking into account not only positional mobility (that is, how families move within a given distribution of wealth), but also structural mobility induced by changes in the distribution of wealth. Such changes are related to two structural phenomena: in the nineteenth century, the rising number of individuals leaving no estate at death and, after World War I, the decline in the number of the very rich who could live off their wealth. The paper studies the movements between these groups and estimates the intergenerational elasticity of wealth, taking into account the persistence at the bottom and at the top.