Biography: Romain Wacziarg is at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he holds the Hans Hufschmid Chair in Management. His research deals with a broad range of topics in political economy, including the interaction between demographic factors and long-run economic development, the links between democracy and growth, the effect of geographic and cultural barriers on the global spread of technologies and behaviors, and the measurement of cultural heterogeneity. His research was published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and numerous field journals. He is the Managing Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA). Prior to joining UCLA, he was at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He holds a PhD from Harvard University (1998)

Abstract: We argue that migrants played a significant role in the diffusion of the demographic transition from France to the rest of Europe in the late 19th century. Employing novel data on French immigration from other European regions from 1850 to 1930, we find that higher immigration to France translated into lower fertility in the region of origin after a few decades – both in cross-region regressions for various periods, and in a panel setting with region fixed-effects. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and across multiple specifications. We also find that immigrants who themselves became French citizens achieved lower fertility, particularly those who moved to French regions with the lowest fertility levels. We interpret these findings in terms of cultural remittances, consistent with insights from a theoretical framework where migrants act as vectors of cultural diffusion, spreading new information, social norms and preferences pertaining to modern fertility to their regions of origin.