Tesi etd-11302022-155439
Link copiato negli appunti
Tipo di tesi
Dottorato
Autore
MARTINEZ, MARCO
URN
etd-11302022-155439
Titolo
Four Essays on Human Capital and Innovation: at the origins of Italian uneven development, 1815-1914
Settore scientifico disciplinare
SECS-P/12
Corso di studi
Istituto di Economia - JOINT PHD IN ECONOMICS
Commissione
relatore Prof. NUVOLARI, ALESSANDRO
Parole chiave
- human capital
- innovation
- modern Italian economic history
- railways
- social mobility
- technological transfer
Data inizio appello
03/05/2023;
Disponibilità
parziale
Riassunto analitico
For more than half of the nineteenth century, Italy remained politically divided into different States. Political borders were removed after the Unification of 1861, but the economic, social, and cultural divides persisted and were even exacerbated after the Unification. Human capital and innovation are widely acknowledged to be crucial factor endowments in developing countries. Although both factors have traditionally been neglected in Italian economic history, recent studies show that they are critical in understanding Italy's regionally uneven long-term growth. By learning more about how human capital and innovation evolved around the time of the Unification period we could indirectly gain new historical insights into the ongoing discussion about the causes and later trends of Italy's geographically unequal industrialization efforts and about what factors were important for this evolution.
This thesis aims to provide new interpretations of the causes and consequences of human capital and innovation patterns from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I by informing each chapter with novel data and methodological approaches. This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first section, which consists of the first two chapters, is concerned with measuring human capital and understanding its relationship to social mobility and gender issues. I concentrate on the understudied Risorgimento period (1815-1861), when the foundations for Unification were set. The second section, which includes the remaining two chapters, makes use of newly collected data sets to investigate the domestic and international determinants of unified Italy's innovation patterns during the Liberal Age period (1861–1914).
The Italian economy was pre-industrial before the Unification. Human capital is an important factor to study in pre-industrial States that are soon to industrialize as higher levels of human capital may have increased the demand and supply of skilled labor and the uptake of advanced technologies from abroad. On the Italian peninsula, the earliest state-led initiatives to provide public education date to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As a result, the early nineteenth century is a critical time period for assessing human capital levels as it is reasonable to assume that this is when regional disparities in human capital first appeared as each Italian state began to formulate its first attempts at educational policy. Thus, in the first chapter, I present a new random sample of 1,218 marriage certificates representing most continental Italy. Among other findings, this new data shows that, according to marriage signatures, the North had literacy rates only 14% higher than the South and 10.7 than the Centre of Italy for spouses marrying in 1815. For women, the North-South literacy gap was even smaller, and the average female literacy rate in Italy was as low as 9%. Literacy rates in Central Italy were close to those in Southern Italy, arguably owing to more elitist schooling systems in Central and Southern Italy than in Northern Italy. Primary-school centralization reforms might have helped women to rapidly improve literacy rates, leading to a first, regionally unequal, ‘Silent Revolution’.
Higher levels of human capital in some areas of Italy may have led to upward mobility over time, with significant implications for the dynamics of wealth accumulation and inequality. Conversely, early industrialization efforts and broader societal changes of the Risorgimento period may have resulted in new occupations and higher social mobility rates, as well as increased demand for education. Thus, in the second chapter, based on Freschi and Martinez, I consider the relationship between human capital and social mobility. We collect approximately 6,000 marriage certificates between the reference years of 1815 and 1866, as well as in four case study areas, each representing a dimension of the ‘many Italies’ of the time. This exercise, in addition to depicting a relatively static and premodern family structure across Italy, discovers that literacy is only associated with women's upward mobility, and that women's upward mobility is mostly limited to transitions from unskilled to lower-skilled social statuses. Furthermore, the link between literacy and social mobility is weaker in industrial areas like Brescia in Northern Italy than in rural and backward areas like Pisticci in Southern Italy. We primarily explain literacy's limited role in increasing social mobility rates by pointing out that, at the time, limited educational provision, particularly for girls, meant that being educated was a result of having a high social status rather than an active channel through which individuals could improve their occupational status through education.
After the Unification, as Italy took its first cautious steps toward industrialization, inventions started to matter more for the quantity and quality of domestic output. Because Italy was a latecomer to industrialization and had a patent law that was open to foreign inventions, it relied heavily on foreign technologies, particularly in key sectors of the Second Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, high rates of foreign technological transfer may not have benefited domestic innovation patterns because Italy lacked sufficient technical education and other factor endowments. In the third chapter, I thus study the relationship between exposure to foreign technologies by Italian inventors and the quality of their inventions. I collect, with Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta, a new data-set including the entire count of more than 131,000 patents registered in Italy, and additional data on patent quality from seven biographical dictionaries, out of which I derive a name-based indicator of eminent inventions and inventors. I find that Italian inventors who were directly exposed to foreign technologies, either because they lived abroad or because they collaborated with inventors located abroad, patented inventions of higher quality and were also more likely to be eminent inventors. However, the magnitude of the positive association is small. Surprisingly, exposure to Germany was associated with a decrease in the quality of their own inventions, whereas exposure to France was associated with an increase in patent quality. Overall, this indicates that, despite the numerical dominance of foreign technologies, Italian inventors were only marginally capable to absorb foreign technologies in order to improve the quality of their inventions.
Besides the dimension of foreign technological transfer, country-specific factors arguably mattered too in explaining the spatially uneven patterns of innovation across Italy. Among these factors, infrastructure development may have played a key role in facilitating knowledge transfer and access to new markets by remote inventors, as documented in other developing countries. Indeed, the Italian railroad system expanded dramatically in the two decades following the Unification, for reasons related to nation-building and related military troop movements rather than economic motivations. Railroads represented the nation's ideals of unity and independence in a divided country—the same ideals that led to political unification. In the fourth chapter, based on Martinez, Nuvolari, and Vasta, I examine the impact of railroad expansion on municipal-level measures of innovation using the entire count of 36,057 inventions registered by Italian residents from 1855 to 1911. I also rely on a newly created database that lists all railroad stops along with their year of construction, as well as other pre-determined geo covariates. We rely on a staggered difference-in-differences empirical approach before validating and supplementing it with alternative approaches. We find that railroad expansion had a significant impact on the diffusion of innovation opportunities (number of municipalities patenting at least once) during the first wave of railroad construction in Unified Italy (around 1862-1880), even in small and remote municipalities. Railroads also increased the intensity of innovation (number of patents per capita) in small municipalities, but the effect on smaller municipalities was consistent between 1862 and 1871. We were unable to find an effect of the second wave of railroad construction (1877-1896), which was intended to connect more remote locations for economic integration purposes. The mechanisms underlying the results are then investigated. We discover that railroads built in the South had fewer impacts on innovation than railroads built in the North, that literacy rates were important conductive factors from railroad expansion to innovation, and that post offices were complementary to the observed effect of railroads, while seaports were substitutes for railroads as innovation drivers. Contrary to what the new empirical literature on railroads discovered, and more in line with traditional historical interpretations of the role of railroads in economic development, the Italian case suggests that, while railroads can increase innovation potential, they are not universally beneficial for invention and industrialization when other basic conditions are lacking.
Finally, I conclude the thesis by presenting a summary of the findings and relating them to the relevant literature, as well as discussing future research developments. At the end of the thesis I provide an overall bibliography lists the sources used, as well as the references for each chapter.
This thesis aims to provide new interpretations of the causes and consequences of human capital and innovation patterns from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I by informing each chapter with novel data and methodological approaches. This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first section, which consists of the first two chapters, is concerned with measuring human capital and understanding its relationship to social mobility and gender issues. I concentrate on the understudied Risorgimento period (1815-1861), when the foundations for Unification were set. The second section, which includes the remaining two chapters, makes use of newly collected data sets to investigate the domestic and international determinants of unified Italy's innovation patterns during the Liberal Age period (1861–1914).
The Italian economy was pre-industrial before the Unification. Human capital is an important factor to study in pre-industrial States that are soon to industrialize as higher levels of human capital may have increased the demand and supply of skilled labor and the uptake of advanced technologies from abroad. On the Italian peninsula, the earliest state-led initiatives to provide public education date to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As a result, the early nineteenth century is a critical time period for assessing human capital levels as it is reasonable to assume that this is when regional disparities in human capital first appeared as each Italian state began to formulate its first attempts at educational policy. Thus, in the first chapter, I present a new random sample of 1,218 marriage certificates representing most continental Italy. Among other findings, this new data shows that, according to marriage signatures, the North had literacy rates only 14% higher than the South and 10.7 than the Centre of Italy for spouses marrying in 1815. For women, the North-South literacy gap was even smaller, and the average female literacy rate in Italy was as low as 9%. Literacy rates in Central Italy were close to those in Southern Italy, arguably owing to more elitist schooling systems in Central and Southern Italy than in Northern Italy. Primary-school centralization reforms might have helped women to rapidly improve literacy rates, leading to a first, regionally unequal, ‘Silent Revolution’.
Higher levels of human capital in some areas of Italy may have led to upward mobility over time, with significant implications for the dynamics of wealth accumulation and inequality. Conversely, early industrialization efforts and broader societal changes of the Risorgimento period may have resulted in new occupations and higher social mobility rates, as well as increased demand for education. Thus, in the second chapter, based on Freschi and Martinez, I consider the relationship between human capital and social mobility. We collect approximately 6,000 marriage certificates between the reference years of 1815 and 1866, as well as in four case study areas, each representing a dimension of the ‘many Italies’ of the time. This exercise, in addition to depicting a relatively static and premodern family structure across Italy, discovers that literacy is only associated with women's upward mobility, and that women's upward mobility is mostly limited to transitions from unskilled to lower-skilled social statuses. Furthermore, the link between literacy and social mobility is weaker in industrial areas like Brescia in Northern Italy than in rural and backward areas like Pisticci in Southern Italy. We primarily explain literacy's limited role in increasing social mobility rates by pointing out that, at the time, limited educational provision, particularly for girls, meant that being educated was a result of having a high social status rather than an active channel through which individuals could improve their occupational status through education.
After the Unification, as Italy took its first cautious steps toward industrialization, inventions started to matter more for the quantity and quality of domestic output. Because Italy was a latecomer to industrialization and had a patent law that was open to foreign inventions, it relied heavily on foreign technologies, particularly in key sectors of the Second Industrial Revolution. Nonetheless, high rates of foreign technological transfer may not have benefited domestic innovation patterns because Italy lacked sufficient technical education and other factor endowments. In the third chapter, I thus study the relationship between exposure to foreign technologies by Italian inventors and the quality of their inventions. I collect, with Alessandro Nuvolari and Michelangelo Vasta, a new data-set including the entire count of more than 131,000 patents registered in Italy, and additional data on patent quality from seven biographical dictionaries, out of which I derive a name-based indicator of eminent inventions and inventors. I find that Italian inventors who were directly exposed to foreign technologies, either because they lived abroad or because they collaborated with inventors located abroad, patented inventions of higher quality and were also more likely to be eminent inventors. However, the magnitude of the positive association is small. Surprisingly, exposure to Germany was associated with a decrease in the quality of their own inventions, whereas exposure to France was associated with an increase in patent quality. Overall, this indicates that, despite the numerical dominance of foreign technologies, Italian inventors were only marginally capable to absorb foreign technologies in order to improve the quality of their inventions.
Besides the dimension of foreign technological transfer, country-specific factors arguably mattered too in explaining the spatially uneven patterns of innovation across Italy. Among these factors, infrastructure development may have played a key role in facilitating knowledge transfer and access to new markets by remote inventors, as documented in other developing countries. Indeed, the Italian railroad system expanded dramatically in the two decades following the Unification, for reasons related to nation-building and related military troop movements rather than economic motivations. Railroads represented the nation's ideals of unity and independence in a divided country—the same ideals that led to political unification. In the fourth chapter, based on Martinez, Nuvolari, and Vasta, I examine the impact of railroad expansion on municipal-level measures of innovation using the entire count of 36,057 inventions registered by Italian residents from 1855 to 1911. I also rely on a newly created database that lists all railroad stops along with their year of construction, as well as other pre-determined geo covariates. We rely on a staggered difference-in-differences empirical approach before validating and supplementing it with alternative approaches. We find that railroad expansion had a significant impact on the diffusion of innovation opportunities (number of municipalities patenting at least once) during the first wave of railroad construction in Unified Italy (around 1862-1880), even in small and remote municipalities. Railroads also increased the intensity of innovation (number of patents per capita) in small municipalities, but the effect on smaller municipalities was consistent between 1862 and 1871. We were unable to find an effect of the second wave of railroad construction (1877-1896), which was intended to connect more remote locations for economic integration purposes. The mechanisms underlying the results are then investigated. We discover that railroads built in the South had fewer impacts on innovation than railroads built in the North, that literacy rates were important conductive factors from railroad expansion to innovation, and that post offices were complementary to the observed effect of railroads, while seaports were substitutes for railroads as innovation drivers. Contrary to what the new empirical literature on railroads discovered, and more in line with traditional historical interpretations of the role of railroads in economic development, the Italian case suggests that, while railroads can increase innovation potential, they are not universally beneficial for invention and industrialization when other basic conditions are lacking.
Finally, I conclude the thesis by presenting a summary of the findings and relating them to the relevant literature, as well as discussing future research developments. At the end of the thesis I provide an overall bibliography lists the sources used, as well as the references for each chapter.
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