Early Modern Academies, Universities and Growth

Knowledge production is vital to modern progress, but what about the past? Pre-industrial European academic institutions are often assumed to have been flawed, with misallocated resources and talent. In this paper, I examine the role of academies, dynamic and scientifically oriented institutions that emerged between 1650 and 1800. Using new data on historical European academia and advanced difference-in-difference methods, I find that academies contributed to long-term urban growth. Exploiting individual-level data on scholars, I further show that literary academies had no long-term effect, whereas scientific academies led to persistent growth. Finally, I demonstrate that academies had positive spillover effects, both on the growth of neighboring cities and on the quality of pre-existing universities. Altogether, I provide the first empirical evidence of the pivotal role scientific academies played in Europe’s economic growth.