*In this paper, I investigate how varying degrees of coercion during the era of slavery may have influenced both the presence as well as the quality of fathers across multiple generations. I focus on a Caribbean context and study two former French sugar colonies - Guadeloupe and Martinique. I find that historical exposure to coercion during slavery had lasting repercussions on fatherhood and family dynamics in the post-abolition era. The type of crop produced, sugar or coffee, played a pivotal role in shaping the levels of violence exposure among enslaved populations. Rather than coercion per se, I highlight the potential role of white men fathering illegitimate children during slavery as a an underexplored explanation for the phenomenon of absentee fathers post-abolition. I also find that historical exposure to coercion of parents significantly worsens a child’s environment - but only through the father. This effect is persistent overtime, and is not accounted for by composition effects or geography. Rather, it should be understood as an effect that comes from fathers themselves. I undertake a massive digitization effort of archival records on the universe of enslaved individuals and their descendants (100,000 pages). I do so by developing an open-source Optical Character Recognition Pipeline specifically tailored for historical handwritten documents.

**This paper seeks to analyse how labour market concentration affects gender inequalities in wages and working conditions. While theoretical models predict that firms will be able to extract a monopsony rent from workers who have lower geographical mobility, very specific skills, or specific working conditions’ requirements, there was until recent years very limited empirical evidence on this topic Using French matched employer-employee data (Déclaration Annuelle des Données Sociales, DADS) together with data on working conditions (Enquête conditions de travail), we first estimate whether gender gaps in wages and working conditions are significantly different across local labour markets differing in their employment concentration. Second, we will test whether gender gaps in wages and working conditions show a positive or a negative relationship among them, which could be suggestive of compensating wage differentials.