Abstract

Centuries before the demographic transition, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) limited fertility in Western Europe through high celibacy, late age at first marriage, and nuclear household structures. This paper uncovers an institutional factor that shaped the EMP: inheritance customs. We construct a novel atlas of 200 local inheritance customs in pre-industrial France and Belgium and examine individual-level marriage decisions from genealogical records of 53,672 women born in 1670–1750. We document two facts about the EMP: a substantial amount of local variation in its prevalence, and a U-shaped relationship between access to inheritance, women’s economic opportunities, and celibacy. This is consistent with inheritance customs affecting marriage decisions through women’s empowerment and eased financial constraints to form a household. These two channels allow to reconcile conflicting findings on the relationship between the EMP and economic development.