Academic dynasties
Subtitle: decentralization and familism in the Italian academia
By: Ruben Durante, Giovanna Labartino, Roberto Perotti
Contributors: Labartino, Giovanna; Perotti, Roberto; National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 17572; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 17572.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "Decentralization can lead to "good" or "bad" outcomes depending on the socio-cultural norms of the targeted communities.  We investigate this issue by looking at the evolution of familism and nepotism in the Italian academia before and after the 1998 reform, which decentralized the recruitment of professors from the national to the university level.  To capture familism we use a novel dataset on Italian university professors between 1988 and 2008 focusing on the informative content of last names.  We construct two indices of "homonymy" which capture the concentration of last names in a given academic department relative to that in the underlying general population.  Our results suggest that increased autonomy by local university officials resulted in a significant increase in the incidence of familism in areas characterized by low civic capital but not in areas with higher civic capital"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 1/12/2012.

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