The Academic Market and The Rise of Universities in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1000–1800)

Abstract

We argue that market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital across Europe during the Middle Ages, and contributed to bolstering universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scientific Revolutions. We build a unique database of thousands of scholars from university sources covering all of Europe, construct an index of their ability, and map the academic market in the medieval and early modern periods. We show that scholars tended to concentrate in the best universities (agglomeration), that better scholars were more sensitive to the quality of the university (positive sorting) and migrated over greater distances (positive selection). Agglomeration, selection, and sorting patterns testify to an integrated academic market, made possible by the use of a common language (Latin).

The Fall of Constantinople and the Rise of the West

“…Within this broader body of literature, recent work has focused on the role of upper-tail human capital in pre-industrial development (Squicciarini and Voigtländer, 2015;Dittmar and Meisenzahl, 2020;Serafinelli and Tabellini, 2022;Becker, Pino, and Vidal-Robert, 2021;De la Croix, Docquier, Fabre, and Stelter, 2022). 1 Squicciarini and Voigtländer (2015) emphasize the important role of uppertail human capital in the Industrial Revolution.…”

“…1 Squicciarini and Voigtländer (2015) emphasize the important role of uppertail human capital in the Industrial Revolution. More recent work sheds first light on the formation of upper-tail human capital in the early modern period by highlighting the role of institutions (Dittmar and Meisenzahl, 2020;Serafinelli and Tabellini, 2022) and of market forces (De la Croix et al, 2022). This paper also contributes to understanding the role played by upper-tail human capital in the early modern period, by linking knowledge diffusion from Greek migrants to the local population to higher levels of upper-tail human capital at the city level, and by showing that this knowledge diffusion consequently led to more inventions.…”