Chiara Zanardello

Chiara Zanardello

Research Fellow

Working Papers

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

Abstract. Knowledge is central to modern economic growth, but what role did it play in the past? This paper studies whether Early Modern academies, research-oriented institutions that spread across Europe between 1650 and 1800, were associated with long-run growth. Using novel data on individual scholars, I show that academy creation was followed by higher urban population growth over the long run. This pattern is driven mainly by scientific academies, while literary academies show little evidence of comparable effects. Complementary analyses suggest that scientific academies were also linked to short-run positive spillovers to nearby cities and to improvements in local university quality. Overall, these findings provide new pan-European evidence consistent with scientific academies being part of Europe’s long-run 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, home to thousands of scholars from the Middle Ages to the First Industrial Revolution. By inferring co-presence from institutional affiliations, we simulate how ideas would spread from a scholar to another across the European academic network. 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 was locally fragile but globally robust, pointing towards academia as being a connective infrastructure underlying early European development.

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).