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Date: | 2009 |
Title: | Banks and Development: Jewish Communities in the Italian Renaissance and Current Economic Performance |
Contributor: | The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives |
Author: | Jel O Timothy Besley Luigi Pascali Philip Strahan Shannon Seitz Fabio Schiantarelli Daniele Paserman Stelios Michalopoulos Arthur Lewbel Ross Levine Matteo Iacoviello Francesco Giavazzi Fabio Ghironi Scott Fulford Donald Cox |
Description: | [JOB MARKET PAPER] Do banks a¤ect long-term economic performance? I answer this question 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: … rst, the Jews were the only people in Italy allowed to lend for a pro…t; second the Franciscan reaction to Jewish usury led to the creation of charity lending institutions that evolved into many of the current Italian banks. Using Jewish demography in 1450 as an instrument, I estimate large e¤ects of current banking development on the income-per-capita of Italian cities. Additional …rm-level analyses suggest that well-functioning local banks exert large e¤ects on aggregate productivity by reallocating resources toward more e ¢ cient …rms. Controlling for province e¤ects, using additional historical data on Jewish demography and exploiting the expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish territories in Italy in 1541, I argue that my results are not driven by omitted institutional, cultural and geographical characteristics. In particular, I show that the di¤erence 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. These di¤erence-in-di¤erence estimates suggest that the Jewish Diaspora can explain at least 10 % of the current income gap between Northern and Southern Italy. |
URI: | https://www.amad.org/jspui/handle/123456789/59260 |
Other Identifier: | http://www.csef.it/seminarpdf/pascali_jmp.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.614.7537 |
AMAD ID: | 673561 |
Appears in Collections: | BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) General history of Europe |