Seminar in Economics | Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088-1800) with David de la Croix, UCLouvain

Department of Economics welcomes you to a seminar with David de la Croix, Universite Catholique Louvain, presenting "Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088-1800)". Exploiting multi-generation correlations and parent-child distributional differences, we identify the structural parameters of a Markov process of intergenerational transmission with nepotism.

Start time: 2021-12-01 at 15:30

End time: 2021-12-01 at 16:45

Location: Sveavägen 65, Room 550

Welcome to this Higher Seminar in Economics organised by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is David de la Croix, Professor of Economics at UCLouvain. David will present the paper "Nepotism vs. Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in Academia (1088-1800)".

Abstract

We build a database of families of scholars, measure their publications, and develop a general method to disentangle two determinants of occupational persistence: nepotism vs. inherited human capital. This requires jointly addressing measurement error in human capital and selection from nepotism. Exploiting multi-generation correlations and parent-child distributional differences, we identify the structural parameters of a Markov process of intergenerational transmission with nepotism. The human capital elasticity is lower than in standard multi-generation estimates ignoring nepotism. Nepotism was lower in science vs. law, in Protestant institutions, and declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment - testifying to the rise of meritocracy.

David de la Croix is Professor of Economics at UCLouvain (Belgium) and research fellow at CEPR. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Demographic Economics.

His research interests cover demographic economics, human capital and growth with a long-run historical perspective, and conflicts between generations. He passion is understanding households’ incentives in the present and in the past.