Dividing the Spoils: Inheritance Institutions and Gender Inequality before Industrialization

Do the preindustrial roots of gender inequality lie in exogenous forces or also in human institutions? We address this question using data on women’s wealth, wages, household independence, and youth employment for an entire German state in 1545. That state straddled one of Europe’s most enduring institutional divides: the split between partible and impartible inheritance systems. Under partible inheritance, daughters received equal shares with their brothers and widows retained roughly half the marital property. Under impartible inheritance, by contrast, daughters and widows had no claim to a fixed share and were forced to bargain over property with male relatives. We find that partible inheritance made women 50 percent wealthier relative to men, 30 percent more likely to head a household independently, and 21 percent more prevalent among servant employees. The magnitude of these effects of inheritance institutions resembles the impact of major economic transformations such as the Industrial Revolution.