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Lineages of Scholars in pre-industrial Europe: Nepotism vs Intergenerational Human Capital Transmission

Author

Listed:
  • David de la Croix

    (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES))

  • Marc Goni

    (Department of Economics, University of Vienna)

Abstract

We propose a new methodology to disentangle two determinants of intergenerational persistence: inherited human capital vs. nepotism. This requires jointly addressing measurement error in human-capital proxies and the selection bias inherent to nepotism. We do so by exploiting standard multi-generation correlations together with distributional differences across generations in the same occupation. These two moments identify the structural parameters of a first-order Markov process of human-capital endowments' transmission, extended to account for nepotism. We apply our method to a newly built database of more than one thousand scholar lineages in higher education institutions over the period 1000-1800. Our results show that 14 percent of scholar's sons were nepotic scholars. Nepotism declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, was more prominent in Catholic than in Protestant institutions, and was higher in law than in sciences. Human-capital endowments were inherited with an intergenerational elasticity of 0.59, higher than suggested by parent-child elasticities in observed outcomes (publications), yet lower than recent estimates in the literature (0.75) which do not account for nepotism.

Suggested Citation

  • David de la Croix & Marc Goni, 2020. "Lineages of Scholars in pre-industrial Europe: Nepotism vs Intergenerational Human Capital Transmission," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2020006, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
  • Handle: RePEc:ctl:louvir:2020006
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Intergenerational mobility; human capital transmission; nepotism; university scholars; upper-tail human capital; pre-industrial Europe;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C31 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions; Social Interaction Models
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics

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