Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15159
Authors: David de la Croix; Marc Goni
Abstract: We argue that the waning of nepotism in academia bolstered scientific production in pre-industrial Europe. We build a database of families of scholars (1088-1800), measure their scientific output, and develop a general method to disentangle nepotism from inherited human capital -two determinants of occupational persistence. This requires jointly addressing measurement error in human capital proxies and sample selection bias arising from nepotism. Our method exploits multi-generation correlations together with parent-child distributional differences to identify the structural parameters of a first-order Markov process of human capital transmission with nepotism. We find an intergenerational human capital elasticity of 0.59, higher than that suggested by parent-child elasticities, yet lower than multi-generation estimates ignoring nepotism. On average, 16 percent of scholars' sons achieved their position because of nepotism. Nepotism was lower in science than in law and in Protestant than in Catholic institutions, and declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment---two periods of buoyant scientific advancement.
Keywords: intergenerational mobility; human capital transmission; nepotism; university scholars; upper-tail human capital; preindustrial Europe
JEL Codes: C31; E24; J1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| nepotism (M51) | misallocation of talent (D29) |
| nepotism (M51) | distortion of idea production (O36) |
| decline of nepotism (J12) | positive influence on scientific production (O36) |
| nepotism (M51) | reduction of scientific output (O47) |
| intergenerational human capital elasticity (J24) | scientific production (E23) |
| nepotism in law (K36) | nepotism in science (D73) |
| nepotism in Protestant institutions (Z12) | nepotism in Catholic institutions (Z12) |