EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Academic Dynasties: Decentralization and Familism in the Italian Academia

Roberto Perotti and Giovanna Labartino ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Ruben Durante

No 8645, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

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.

Keywords: Civic capital; Familism; Higher education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D73 I23 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP8645 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Academic Dynasties: Decentralization and Familism in the Italian Academia (2011) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8645

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP8645

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:8645