Chiara Zanardello

Chiara Zanardello

Ph.D. Candidate

Working Papers

Early Modern Academies, Universities, and Economic Growth (Job Market Paper) LIDAM Discussion Paper - 2024/12

Abstract. Knowledge production is vital to modern progress, but what about the past? Pre-industrial European academic institutions are often assumed to have been flawed, with misallocated resources and talent. In this paper, I examine the role of academies, dynamic and scientifically oriented institutions that emerged between 1650 and 1800. Using new data on historical European academia and advanced difference-in-difference methods, I find that academies contributed to long-term urban growth. Exploiting individual-level data on scholars, I further show that literary academies had no long-term effect, whereas scientific academies led to persistent growth. Finally, I demonstrate that academies had positive spillover effects, both on the growth of neighboring cities and on the quality of pre-existing universities. Altogether, I provide the first empirical evidence of the pivotal role scientific academies played in Europe’s economic growth.

Work in progress

Salvation, Plants, and Cosmos: How Pre-modern Academia Spread Ideas (with David de la Croix, and Rossana Scebba)

Abstract. While having good ideas is not uncommon, their spread and evolution require a community. In premodern Europe (1084-1793), approximately 200 universities and 150 academies of sciences employed thousands of scholars, shaping an extensive network of intellectual exchange. By reconstructing inter-personal connections through institutional affiliations, we demonstrate how the European academic landscape facilitated the diffusion of ideas and led cities to develop – examples include botanic gardens, observatories, and Protestantism. Counterfactual simulations reveal that both universities and academies played crucial roles – alongside serendipity and more traditional channels such as books – with academies being particularly effective in connecting distant parts of the network. Moreover, we show that idea diffusion through the network remains remarkably resilient, even after the removal of key regions such as England or France. In Europe, ideas gain significance being effectively channelled by powerful institutions.

Publications

Market Forces in Italian Academia today (and yesterday)

Published in Scientometrics, 2022

This paper investigates the operation of the academic market in Italy, mapping current scholars’ location choices. I build a new dataset of current professors, associating each scholar with a composite indicator of their quality. The analysis includes the quality of the university and the features of the city where the institution is located. I estimate the strength of different factors: gravity (distance), agglomeration (scholars are attracted to higher quality universities), selection (better scholars travel longer distances), and sorting (the better the scholar, the more the quality of universities is weighted). I find that all of these factors have an effect, and do not vary according to scholars’ gender. I find a greater expected utility for scholars in choosing private universities over public ones, through a consistent nesting procedure. Comparing these forces to historical trends in Italian academia, the sorting effect delineates a new momentum for the current academic market in Italy.

Recommended citation: Zanardello, C. Market forces in Italian academia today (and yesterday). Scientometrics 128, 651–698 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04579-0

RETE - Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae

RETE is a collection of data papers, summarizing information on the scholars who taught at premodern European universities or were members of scientific academies. The period covered goes from the emergence of the first universities (1000CE) to the eve of the Industrial Revolution (1800CE).