Working Paper: NBER ID: w17572
Authors: Ruben Durante; Giovanna Labartino; Roberto Perotti
Abstract: Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities. We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of professors from the national to the university level. To capture familism we use a novel dataset on Italian university professors between 1988 and 2008 focusing on the informative content of last names. We construct two indices of "homonymy" which capture the concentration of last names in a given academic department relative to that in the underlying general population. Our results suggest that increased autonomy by local university officials resulted in a significant increase in the incidence of familism in areas characterized by low civic capital but not in areas with higher civic capital.
Keywords: Decentralization; Familism; Nepotism; Civic Capital; Italian Academia
JEL Codes: D71; D73; I23; J44; Z1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Decentralization of professor recruitment in 1998 (D29) | Increase in the incidence of familism in Italian academia (J12) |
| Increase in the incidence of familism in Italian academia (J12) | Poorer academic outcomes (I24) |
| High civic capital (H54) | Mitigates costs of decentralization (D23) |
| Low civic capital (Z13) | Enhances benefits of decentralization (H77) |
| Civic capital (H54) | Moderates impact of reform on familism (J12) |