Banks and development : Jewish communities in the Italian Renaissance and current economic performance

Are differences in local banking development long-lasting? Do they affect long-term economic performance? I answer these questions by relying on an historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the 15th century. A sudden change in the Catholic doctrine had driven the Jews toward money lending. Cities that were hosting Jewish communities developed complex banking institutions for two reasons: first, the Jews were the only people in Italy who were allowed to lend for a profit and, second, the Franciscan reaction to Jewish usury led to the creation of charity lending institutions, the Monti di Pietá, that have survived until today and have become the basis of the Italian banking system. Using Jewish demography in 1500 as an instrument, I provide evidence of (1) an extraordinary persistence in the level of banking development across Italian cities (2) large effects of current local banking development on per-capita income. Additional firm-level analyses suggest that well-functioning local banks exert large effects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources toward more efficient firms. I exploit the expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish territories in Italy in 1541 to argue that my results are not driven by omitted institutional, cultural and geographical characteristics. In particular, I show that, in Central Italy, the difference in current income between cities that hosted Jewish communities and cities that did not exists only in those regions that were not Spanish territories in the 16th century

Productivity and the welfare of nations

We show that the welfare of a countryís infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across countries. The result holds regardless of the type of production technology and the degree of product market competition. It applies to open economies as well, if TFP is constructed using domestic absorption, instead of gross domestic product, as the measure of output. Welfare relevant TFP needs to be constructed with prices and quantities as perceived by consumers, not firms. Thus, factor shares need to be calculated using after-tax wages and rental rates, and will typically sum to less than one. These results are used to calculate welfare gaps and growth rates in a sample of advanced countries with high-quality data on output, hours worked, and capital. We also present evidence for a broader sample that includes both advanced and developing countries

Productivity, welfare and reallocation : theory and firm-level evidence

A considerable literature has focused on the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP), prompted by the empirical finding that TFP accounts for the bulk of long-term growth. This paper offers a deeper reason for such focus: the welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by current and anticipated future Solow productivity residuals. The equivalence holds for any specification of technology and market structure, as long as the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies total factor productivity as the right summary measure of welfare, even in situations where it does not properly measure technology, and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate welfare using readily available data. Based on this finding, the authors compute firm and industry contributions to welfare for a set of European countries (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain) using industry-level and firm-level data. With additional assumptions about technology and market structure (specifically, that firms minimize costs and face common factor prices), the authors show that welfare change can be further decomposed into three components that reflect, respectively, technical change, aggregate distortions, and allocative efficiency. Then, using the appropriate firm-level data, they assess the importance of each of these components as sources of welfare improvement in the same set of European countries.Economic Theory&Research,E-Business,Economic Growth,Labor Policies,Technology Industry

Banks and development : Jewish communities in the Italian Renaissance and current economic performance

Are differences in local banking development long lasting? Do they affect economic performance? I answer these questions by relying on a historical development that occurred in Italian cities during the Renaissance. A change in Catholic doctrine led to the development of modern banks in cities hosting Jewish communities. Using Jewish demography in 1500 as an instrument, I provide evidence of extraordinary persistence in the level of banking development across Italian cities and substantial effects of local banks on per capita income. Additional firm-level analyses suggest that banks exert large effects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources toward more efficient firms

Religion, division of labor and conflict : anti-semitism in Germany over 600 years

We study the role of economic incentives in shaping the co-existence of Jews, Catholics and Protestants, using novel data from Germany for 1,000+ cities. The Catholic usury ban and higher literacy rates gave Jews a specific advantage in the moneylending sector. Following the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Jews lost these advantages in regions that became Protestant. We show 1) a change in the geography of anti-Semitism with persecutions of Jews and anti-Jewish publications becoming more common in Protestant areas relative to Catholic areas; 2) a more pronounced change in cities where Jews had already established themselves as moneylenders. These findings are consistent with the interpretation that, following the Protestant Reformation, Jews living in Protestant regions were exposed to competition with the Christian majority, especially in moneylending, leading to an increase in anti-Semitism

Productivity, Welfare and Reallocation: Theory and Firm-Level Evidence

We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies TFP as the right summary measure of welfare (even in situations where it does not properly measure technology) and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate welfare using readily available TFP data. Based on this finding, we compute firm and industry contributions to welfare for a set of European OECD countries (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain), using industry-level (EU-KLEMS) and firm-level (Amadeus) data. After adding further assumptions about technology and market structure (firms minimize costs and face common factor prices), we show that welfare change can be decomposed into three components that reflect respectively technical change, aggregate distortions and allocative efficiency. Then, using the appropriate firm-level data, we assess the importance of each of these components as sources of welfare improvement in the same set of European countries.productivity, welfare, reallocation, technology, TFP

Cambiare il lessico: nuove competenze e responsabilità degli urbanisti

L’interesse si concentra sui cambiamenti della disciplina e su come il lessico possa operare positivamente in tale contesto evolutivo, piuttosto che sul repertorio dei cambiamenti del lessico stesso. Impostazione, questa, che tende a enfatizzare il ruolo proattivo della ricerca linguistica, e più in generale della ricerca comunicativa, come componente importante della dialettica propositiva di intervento. Lemmi vecchi e nuovi vengono così a comporsi e a contrapporsi con diversi e/o permanenti significati, e soprattutto in ambiti epistemologici sempre più complessi rispetto al passato e più ifficilmente racchiudibili in forme discorsive semplici, stabili e univocamente definite. In tal senso anche il discreto interesse sul tema segnala l’esigenza di soffermarsi specificamente sul lessico «concettuale-critico» piuttosto che sul lessico «tecnico-pratico» variamente frequentato in passato, quando si pensava forse a modi di consolidamento operativo della disciplina che sembravano a portata di mano. L’esigenza nasce evidentemente proprio dal voler fissare, seppur temporaneamente e parzialmente, la situazione fluida della contemporaneità, della complessità incrementale dei processi trasformativi, delle rapide irruzioni di potenti valenze sociali, economiche e ambientali nel territorio globalizzato che prefigurano stadi di mutevolezza continua. Il lessico può contribuire all’avanzamento del fronte conoscitivo e di quello operativo della disciplina