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🔴 Nepotism vs. intergenerational transmission of human capital in Academia (1088–1800)

"From the Bernoullis to the Eulers, families of scholars have been common in academia since the foundation of the first university in 1088. In this paper, we have shown that this was the result of two factors: Initially, scholars’ sons benefited from their fathers’ connections to get jobs at their fathers’ university. Between 1088 and 1543, about one in two scholars’ sons benefited from nepotism. They became academics even when their underlying human capital was lower than that of marginal first-generation scholar. After the Scientific Revolution, nepotism faded but families remained in academia."

Croix, D.d.l., Goñi, M. Nepotism vs. intergenerational transmission of human capital in Academia (1088–1800). J Econ Growth 29, 469–514 (2024). doi.org/10.1007/s10887-024-092

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Nepotism vs. intergenerational transmission of human capital in Academia (1088–1800) - Journal of Economic Growth

We have constructed a comprehensive database that traces the publications of father–son pairs in the premodern academic realm and examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence. We find that human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children and that nepotism declined when the misallocation of talent across professions incurred greater social costs. Specifically, nepotism was less common in fields experiencing rapid changes in the knowledge frontier, such as the sciences and within Protestant institutions. Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable.

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