Stéphane Benveniste*, Pauline Morault**

Internal seminars
phd seminar

Stéphane Benveniste*, Pauline Morault**

AMSE
Social reproduction in the French Grandes Écoles throughout the 20th century: the insight of surnames*
Arranged marriages, premarital investments and the family network**
Joint with
Alain Trannoy*
Venue

IBD Salle 16

Îlot Bernard du Bois - Salle 16

AMU - AMSE
5-9 boulevard Maurice Bourdet
13001 Marseille

Date(s)
Tuesday, May 15 2018| 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Contact(s)

Edward Levavasseur: edward.levavasseur[at]univ-amu.fr
Océane Piétri: oceane.pietri[at]univ-amu.fr
Morgan Raux: morgan.raux[at]univ-amu.fr

Abstract

*This paper tackles multigenerational social mobility in the French Grandes Écoles (higher education elite schools) using surnames to track lineages. We constructed a nominative dataset of 295,069 graduate students from eleven French elite schools over six cohorts from 1886 to 2015. We estimated the relative admission rates of several groups of surnames across generations. Essentially, we compared the frequency of surnames in the schools to their frequency among the French population. Our methodology shows that Parisians have had 5 to 9 times more chances to enroll such schools over the last century and that aristocratic families significantly increased their presence in the Grandes Écoles, providing more than 3% of the students nowadays. These patterns differ depending on schools’ specializations. We investigated the benefits of having a relative who studied in a Grande École, using rare surnames in order to focus on actual relatives, and not on bearers of highly occurring surnames. The offspring of a graduate from a century ago still has 2.5 to 5 times more chances to enroll today. Although social mobility in the Grandes Écoles has improved over the 20th Century through the higher number of admissions, our results provide evidence that the French elite succeeds at securing the education outcomes of its offspring over generations.

**In many societies, parents still greatly influence the marriage of their children. Arranged marriages are documented from Renaissance Europe to contemporary rural India and are still a widespread form of matchmaking in the developing world. However, this family dimension has been largely overlooked by the existing matching literature on marriages. When we consider complex family structures, matching on the marriage market determines the network of connected families. Families are interconnected through the marriages of their children. The objective of this paper is to study the structure of the family network and its determinants. The most segregated network structure is characterized by perfect positive assortative matching with respect to family revenue and family size. But there are forces that overcome segregation. Differentiated social norms relating to gender only are neutral with respect to the network structure, but any deviation from these norms greatly affects the network. In contrast, social norms that differentiate between children according to birth order or the gender of their siblings increase connectivity. Imbalance in the sex ratio also helps connect the family network, and the nature of the connection depends on which gender is scarce. Finally, the degree of revenue dispersion and the size of the most numerous families also impact network connectivity.