Lineages of Scholars in pre-industrial Europe: Nepotism vs Intergenerational Human Capital Transmission

David de la Croix and Marc Goni ()
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Marc Goni: Department of Economics, University of Vienna

No 2020006, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: We propose a new methodology to disentangle two determinants of intergenerational persistence: inherited human capital vs. nepotism. This requires jointly addressing measurement error in human-capital proxies and the selection bias inherent to nepotism. We do so by exploiting standard multi-generation correlations together with distributional differences across generations in the same occupation. These two moments identify the structural parameters of a first-order Markov process of human-capital endowments' transmission, extended to account for nepotism. We apply our method to a newly built database of more than one thousand scholar lineages in higher education institutions over the period 1000-1800. Our results show that 14 percent of scholar's sons were nepotic scholars. Nepotism declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, was more prominent in Catholic than in Protestant institutions, and was higher in law than in sciences. Human-capital endowments were inherited with an intergenerational elasticity of 0.59, higher than suggested by parent-child elasticities in observed outcomes (publications), yet lower than recent estimates in the literature (0.75) which do not account for nepotism.

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: 2020-02-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gro, nep-lab and nep-mac
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvir:2020006

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