Thomas Baudin

What generates the first migration flows that eventually give rise to mass migration? We argue that inheritance institutions can provide this initial impulse. We study the introduction of the Napoleonic Civil Code in Italy, which imposed equal inheritance and abolished the fedecommesso–a legal institution that preserved family estates intact across generations–across much of Italy after 1805. We combine new data on pre-existing inheritance laws across Italian states, archival records on the family-level use of fedecommesso, and individual-level demographic information from crowdsourced genealogies. Exploiting the introduction of the Civil Code in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the reform increased outmigration by 19–22 percentage points among nobles, the group primarily affected by entail restrictions. Additional evidence shows that the response was concentrated among former fedecommesso families and non-heirs, consistent with the reform converting entailed wealth into liquid inheritance shares. We show that these early migration flows became an important seed of the large Italian emigration waves of the late nineteenth century.