Chiara Zanardello

Chiara Zanardello

Research Fellow

Working Papers

Early Modern Academies, Universities, and Economic Growth LIDAM Discussion Paper - 2024/12

Abstract. Knowledge production is central to modern economic growth but what role did it play in the past? Despite growing interest in the history of human capital, we still know little about how knowledge shaped long-term development in pre-industrial societies. This paper studies the impact of early modern academies—research-oriented learned societies that spread across Europe between 1650 and 1800—on long-run urban growth and higher education. Drawing on newly assembled data and employing advanced difference-in-differences methods, I show that academies contributed to sustained urban growth. Using individual-level data on scholars, I demonstrate that the results are driven by scientifically oriented academies, while literary academies exhibit weaker and less robust patterns. Complementary analyses suggest that academies also affected nearby cities and improved the quality of existing universities, especially when academies had a scientific orientation. These findings provide the first empirical evidence of the pivotal role scientific academies played in shaping Europe’s long-run economic development.

Flora, Cosmos, Salvatio: Pre-modern Academic Institutions and the Spread of Ideas (with David de la Croix, and Rossana Scebba) CEPR Discussion paper DP20569

Abstract. While good ideas can emerge anywhere, it takes a community to develop and disseminate them. In premodern Europe (1084-1793), there were approximately 200 universities and 150 academies of sciences, which were home to thousands of scholars and created an extensive network of intellectual exchange. By reconstructing interpersonal connections that were made via institutional affiliations, we model the spread of ideas on the European academic landscape. We find that the implied exposure patterns align with observed urban developments: examples include botanic gardens, astronomical observatories, and Protestantism. Scholars’ mobility and multiple affiliations sustain the diffusion, and counterfactual simulations underscore the bridging role played by scientific academies. We also show that the spread of ideas through the affiliation network is locally fragile but globally robust. Specifically, initial conditions matter for the speed of diffusion and the survival of ideas. Yet, removing entire geographical regions does not necessarily reduce exposure to ideas.

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

Doctoral Dissertation

Human Capital and Knowledge Networks - Market Forces, Scientific Academies, and the Spread of Ideas in Early Modern Europe

Abstract. This thesis explores the long-term role of knowledge and human capital in shaping Europe’s economic development from 1000 CE to the present. While modern economies rely increasingly on engineers and entrepreneurs, this work adopts a historical lens to investigate how universities, scientific academies, and knowledge networks contributed to growth in earlier periods. The first chapter examines the Italian academic labor market, revealing patterns of job mobility, merit-based sorting, and institutional quality—both today and historically. The second chapter studies the emergence of scientific academies before 1800, showing how these institutions not only promoted economically productive talent but also drove complementary reforms in co-located universities. The final chapter analyzes pre-modern academic networks to trace the spread of ideas across institutions, leveraging affiliation data to simulate knowledge diffusion and highlight institutional influence. Through new datasets and empirical methods, this thesis offers novel insights into the historical foundations of modern knowledge economies.

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).