Medieval universities are one of the most original creations of Western civilization. Students were educated by a plurality of masters, and scholars came from all parts of Europe. In this paper, we build an original database of thousands of scholars from university sources, and map the academic market in the medieval and early modern periods. Using a random utility model, we show that scholars tend to agglomerate in the best universities, and that this phenomenon is more pronounced within the upper tail of the talent distribution (positive sorting). The quality of scholars is measured by their publications. Agglomeration and sorting patterns testify to a functioning academic market, made possible by political fragmentation and the use of a common language (Latin). Using counterfactual simulations, we show that market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital across Europe, and contributed to bolstering European universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scientific Revolutions.

The Academic Market and the Rise of Universities in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1000-1800)

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. In early academia, 40 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 substantially during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment—two periods of buoyant scientific advancement.

Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088--1800)

Science, the Universities, and other Public Spaces: Teaching Science in Europe and the Americas

Historical evolution of organization and governance dimensions of two selected Colombian higher education institutions

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.

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

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John P. Harrison

Papers

The Enlightenment in the University of Salamanca