We invite applications for a funded PhD position in Economics on the project “Access to Healthcare, Human Capital and Economic Growth in France”. The dissertation will be conducted at the intersection of economic history, health economics, and development economics, with a particular focus on how inequalities in access to medical services shaped demographic behaviour, human capital accumulation, and regional economic trajectories during France’s transition to modern economic growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historians and economists have documented improvements in health and living standards over this period, we still lack a systematic analysis of how local access to healthcare influenced individual life courses and long-run development.

The PhD candidate will be closely integrated into the broader research agenda of the ANR project “Families, Migration and Long-run Economic Growth in Europe” (FaMiGrowth), which studies the long-term interactions between demographic behaviour, mobility, and economic development. In particular, the candidate will benefit from access to the project’s large-scale genealogical data infrastructure and ongoing collaborations with researchers working on family dynamics, migration, and intergenerational outcomes across Europe. This connection will enable the dissertation to situate the French case within a wider comparative perspective and to explore how health conditions interacted with family structures, mobility decisions, and demographic change over the long run.

Empirically, the PhD candidate will contribute to the construction and analysis of a novel dataset measuring access to healthcare across French municipalities between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, based on historical registers of medical practitioners. Combined with the genealogical data developed within FaMiGrowth, as well as census records and indicators of local economic conditions, these data will allow the candidate to investigate how the diffusion of medical practitioners affected infant mortality, fertility, migration, longevity, and education.

Beyond documenting demographic responses, the dissertation will examine whether early-life exposure to healthcare translated into long-term socioeconomic advantages and contributed to persistent differences in local development. Potential outcomes include human capital formation, occupational trajectories, geographic mobility, and local economic performance across generations. The project will rely on modern empirical methods, including panel data analysis and causal inference techniques, applied to newly digitised historical microdata. This position is ideally suited for students interested in combining economic history, health economics, family economics, and long-run development within an international and collaborative research environment.

Supervision of the PhD candidate and the research team
The PhD student will be supervised by Profs Thomas Baudin and Adrien Montalbo. The candidate will also benefit from continuous interactions with members of the IFLAME Research Centre and the “Economics and Financial Flows” axis of the LEM research unit.