David de la Croix (UCLouvain): ''67,000 European university professors and academicians: human capital, mobility, families, and religion from 1000 CE to 1800 CE''

Abstract:
The organization of the academic world around self-governing institutions, universities, and academies is one of the characteristics of the European model of development. Between the establishment of the first higher education institutions and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, around 200 universities were founded in Europe. In addition to these universities, there were academies of sciences, arts, and letters, originating in Italy during the Renaissance and developing across Europe, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries. While thousands of academies were established, only about 200 gained significant prominence beyond their original city walls.

The individuals who were active in these institutions represent a significant portion of Europe's intellectual capital over these eight centuries. To build a relational database of these individuals, we consulted 594 secondary sources, enabling them to manually collect information on 67,000 scholars and literati engaged in activities within the 379 institutions we selected.

One specific aspect of our approach, besides its long period and extensive geographic coverage, is attempting to assess the quality of professors and academics, i.e. their human capital. Without salary, income, or expenditure data for the professors and academics in the database, we rely on library funds to catalogue each person's works and derive a measure of human capital.

Measuring human capital allows us to pose questions that could not otherwise be raised. For example, are the most prolific professors more mobile than those who have not written anything in their lives? This question can be analyzed by combining their data with an economic model of location choice. This allows to show the existence of an academic market displaying strong agglomeration and positive sorting effects.

Another interesting question we explore is whether observing both a father and a son in the same institution indicates nepotism or the transmission of human capital between generations. We assess the extent of nepotism by comparing the distribution of human capital between all sons and all fathers, essentially asking whether sons are, on average, less capable than their fathers.

We moreover consider the impact of the Catholic Church's compilation of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) on the researchers in our database and determine in a growth model its impact on the pace of development.

We also use network theory as a tool to study the premodern academic world. By constructing a network of universities where nodes represent universities and links represent shared professors, we illustrate how the Protestant Reformation cleaved the academic world into two distinct communities, Catholics and Protestants, reducing mobility between the two realms. Additional insights on this divide are obtained by looking at the location of the 110 women we found in our sample.