Assets and Retirement: the French Experience, 1820-1940

Ever since the controversies on blue-collar workers' pensions in the mid-nineteenth century, the capacity of individuals to provide their own old-age insurance has been debated. Yesterday, workers were stigmatized for their improvidence and denied all pension rights. Today, there are calls for everyone to be free to build his or her own nest egg for old age. What was the real situation of those who reached old age in a period when there were few or no retirement pensions? Using individual asset data, we estimate the percentage of the population that had enough financial resources to live autonomously their last years of life. Life-cycle savings were highly insufficient to support the elderly in the nineteenth century. Not only workers and the lowest-skilled wage-earners but large groups among the French population did not possess enough assets to subsist in the final period of a life of labour and saving.Ageing, Life Cycle, Pension, Savings, State Welfare, France 19th and 20th Century

Income versus Sanitation; Mortality Decline in Paris, 1880-1914

After 1850, mortality began its long-term fall in most industrialized countries, a process that has been linked to rising incomes and improved water infrastructure. The problem, however, is that these contribution are jointly determined and feedback into each other. Here we estimate their impact using a longitudinal data set on mortality and income for each of Paris' 80 neighborhoods. Income and sanitation both contributed to the decrease in mortality, a standard deviation increase in either variable produces a two years gain in life expectancy. These results give insights on the determinants of the health transition but also on the long-term evolution of health inequality