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Academic Dynasties: Decentralization and Familism in the Italian Academia

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  • 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.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 17572.

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Date of creation: Nov 2011
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17572

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Cited by:
  1. Natalia Montinari & Antonio Nicolò & Regine Oexl, 2012. "Mediocrity and Induced Reciprocity," Jena Economic Research Papers 2012-053, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Max-Planck-Institute of Economics.
  2. Abatemarco, Antonio & Dell'Anno, Roberto, 2012. "The Italian Reform of the academic recruitment system: an appraisal of ANVUR and CUN benchmarks for assessing candidates and commissioners," MPRA Paper 38872, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  3. Federico Boffa & Amedeo Piolatto & Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto, 2012. "Centralization and accountability: theory and evidence from the Clean Air Act," Working Papers 2012/14, Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB).
  4. Zinovyeva, Natalia & Bagues, Manuel F., 2012. "The Role of Connections in Academic Promotions," IZA Discussion Papers 6821, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  5. Esther Duflo & Pascaline Dupas & Michael Kremer, 2012. "School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools," NBER Working Papers 17939, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

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