Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088--1800)
David de la Croix and
Goñi, Marc
No 15159, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
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; Pre-industrial europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 E24 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his and nep-mac
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Working Paper: Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088–1800) (2021)
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