Long-run development
How economies moved from stagnation to growth, and how older institutions still show up in present-day outcomes.
Professor (HDR) · CERDI
Èric Roca Fernández
I am a professor of economics at CERDI, Université Clermont Auvergne.
My research is in economic history and development economics. Most of my current projects study how families came to invest in education, using data assembled from historical sources such as censuses, parish registers, and school records, read with the standard tools of applied microeconomics. Two themes run through much of this work: the history of gender and the family, and replication as a routine part of empirical research. I teach macroeconomics, growth, and development. Students looking for a thesis topic with historical data, or colleagues working on related questions, are welcome to get in touch.
Human capital
The historical roots of schooling and skills, studied mainly through nineteenth-century records.
Gender and the family
How inheritance rules, marriage patterns, and female religious communities shaped women's lives over the long run.
Data and replication
Turning archival sources into usable datasets, and treating replication as part of normal empirical work.
Featured publication
Selected research
L’Astronomie, Société astronomique de France
The Economic Journal · 2023
Solar Eclipses and the Origins of Critical Thinking and Complexity
With Anastasia Litina. We use historical exposure to solar eclipses to study curiosity as a force behind human capital formation, technological advancement, and pre-modern prosperity.