Seminar by Giovanni Prarolo

12.30 Sala Seminari – I° floor, Palazzo Levi Cases, Via del Santo 33

21.11.2017

The Legacy of Political History 1000-1800 for Attitudes Towards the State: Disaggregated Analysis for Italy
(with Paolo Buonanno, Matteo Cervellati and Sara Lazzaroni)

Seminar by Giovanni Prarolo, Università di Bologna

According to historical narratives, the need to build fiscal capacity in the territories that gained independence from the Holy Roman Empire after 1000 AD lead to the emergence of political entities with more inclusive economic institutions. The long term exposure to higher individual freedom (of economic and political initiative) and more productive public policies affected the economic and political attitudes of the affected populations and their descendants that persist still today. To test this hypothesis we systematically reconstruct the political history of each location in Italy by building a yearly cell-level panel collecting information of all political entities ruling in the Italian territory over the period 1000-1800. The results document that in municipalities that belonged to medieval republics tax evasion is today significantly lower, that the effect is stronger in those places that first achieved independence with respect to places annexed later, and it differs depending on the type of republican institution implemented (communal or maritime).