Search

Why so few women graduate in Economics? We investigate the gender gap among Italian university graduates in Economics between 2010 and 2019. With women's probability of graduating in Economics being 27% lower than men's, the gap is larger than in Business and even STEM. The association between the gender gap and the mathematical content of high school curricula is especially strong in Economics. A triple difference analysis shows that a reform raising the mathematical content of traditionally low math curricula caused an increase in the gender gap, with women's probability of graduating in Economics decreasing by 12 percentage points.

This paper studies the effect of preregistration laws on government spending in the U.S. Preregistration allows young citizens to register before being eligible to vote and has been introduced in different states in different years. Employing a difference-in-differences regression design, we first establish that preregistration shifts state-level government spending toward expenditure on higher education. The magnitude of the increase is larger when political competition is weaker and inequality is higher. Second, we document a positive effect of preregistration on state-provided student aid and its number of recipients by comparing higher education institutions within border-county pairs. Lastly, using individual-level data on voting records, we show that preregistration promotes a de facto youth enfranchisement episode. Consistent with a political economy model of distributive politics,the results collectively suggest strong political responsiveness to the needs of the newly-enfranchised constituent group.

The evidence on the demographics of COVID-19 fatalities points to an overrepresentation of minorities and an underrepresentation of women. We investigate the joint impact of race and gender using individual-level georeferenced death data collected by the Cook County Medical Examiner, which we structure as a cell-level panel at a race, block group, week, and year level. Through an event study approach, we establish that Black individuals are affected more harshly than White and that the effect is driven by Black women. The Black female bias is associated with occupational segregation in the health care and transportation sectors and by commuting on public transport.

We study the long-term determinants of the high rates of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly among women, with a focus on family structure and sexual behavior as shaped by the demographic shock following the transatlantic slave trade. First we show that, in clusters where polygyny is more widespread, HIV infection rates are higher. By instrumenting polygyny with the demographic shock we can also establish that this link is causal. Next we turn to the channels through which polygyny is likely to affect HIV infection by focusing on sexual behavior, as captured by the intensity of sexual activity and the frequency of extramarital partnerships. We document relevant gender differences in behavior: in clusters affected by a larger demographic shock men (but not women) display a more intense sexual activity, while women (but not men) are more likely to engage in extramarital partnerships. We employ these findings to instrument sexual behavior when estimating its influence on HIV infection and we show that clusters exhibiting more frequent female extramarital partnerships are affected by significantly higher infection rates. We interpret our results as follows. The demographic shock induced by the slave trade represents a “primordial” risk factor which is still shaping contemporary family structure and sexual behavior. Polygyny is associated with unsatisfying marital relationships, particularly for women, with consequent female infidelity and an increased risk of infection, which is further multiplied for women co-habiting within polygynous households.

Using rich Italian data for the period 2006–2014, we analyze differences in financial behavior between natives and immigrants in a unified setting covering a wide set of outcomes and including a large set of covariates. We document sizeable gaps between native and immigrant households with respect to wealth holdings and financial decisions. Immigrant household heads hold less net wealth than native along the entire wealth distribution. Immigrant status reduces the likelihood of holding risky assets, housing, mortgages, businesses, and valuables, and it increases the likelihood of financial fragility. Standard regression results are corroborated by a propensity score matching strategy. Years since migration, country of origin, and the pattern of intermarriage also matter. The Great Recession has worsened the condition of immigrants in terms of wealth holdings, home ownership, and financial fragility.

Discussion on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on African Americans has been at center stage since the outbreak of the epidemic in the United States. To present day, however, lack of race-disaggregated individual data has prevented a rigorous assessment of the extent of this phenomenon and the reasons why blacks may be particularly vulnerable to the disease. Using individual and georeferenced death data collected daily by the Cook County Medical Examiner, we provide first evidence that race does affect COVID-19 outcomes. The data confirm that in Cook County blacks are overrepresented in terms of COVID-19 related deaths since—as of June 16, 2020—they constitute 35 percent of the dead, so that they are dying at a rate 1.3 times higher than their population share.Furthermore, by combining the spatial distribution of mortality with the 1930s redlining maps for the Chicago area, we obtain a block group level panel dataset of weekly deaths over the period January 1, 2020-June 16, 2020, over which we establish that, after the outbreak of the epidemic, historically lower-graded neighborhoods display a sharper increase in mortality, driven by blacks, while no pre-treatment differences are detected. Thus, we uncover a persistence influence of the racial segregation induced by the discriminatory lending practices of the 1930s, by way of a diminished resilience of the black population to the shock represented by the COVID-19 outbreak. A heterogeneity analysis reveals that the main channels of transmission are socioeconomic status and household composition, whose influence is magnified in combination with a higher black share.JEL CodesI14, J15, N32, N92, R38.

We evaluate the empirical effectiveness of de facto versus de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Using previously-unexploited racially-disaggregated data on voter registration in Mississippi for the years 1896 and 1899, we show that the observed pattern of black political participation is driven by de facto disfranchisement as captured by the presence of a black political majority, which negatively affects black registration. The de jure provisions introduced with the 1890 state constitution and involving literacy tests and poll taxes exert a non-robust impact. Furthermore, a difference-in-differences approach shows that the decline in aggregate turnout pre-dates the introduction of de jure restrictions and confirms a causal effect of the presence of a black political majority. De jure restrictions intensify the influence of the latter after 1890, which suggests that the main effect of the constitutional reforms may have been an institutionalization of de facto disfranchisement.

This chapter reviews the growing body of research in economics which concentrates on the education gender gap and its evolution, over time and across countries. The survey first focuses on gender differentials in the historical period that roughly goes from 1850 to the 1940s and documents the deep determinants of the early phase of female education expansion, including preindustrial conditions, religion, and family and kinship patterns. Next, the survey describes the stylized facts of contemporaneous gender gaps in education, from the 1950s to the present day, accounting for several alternative measures of attainment and achievement and for geographic and temporal differentiations. The determinants of the gaps are then summarized, while keeping a strong emphasis on an historical perspective and disentangling factors related to the labor market, family formation, psychological elements, and societal cultural norms. A discussion follows of the implications of the education gender gap for multiple realms, from economic growth to family life, taking into account the potential for reverse causation. Special attention is devoted to the persistency of gender gaps in the STEM and economics fields.

In this chapter we review the literature on the origins and implications of family structure in historical perspective with a focus on Italian provinces. Furthermore, we present newly collected data on three of the main features of family structure: the female mean age at marriage, the female celibacy rate, and the fraction of illegitimate births. Data are collected at the provincial level for 1871. The analysis of the data allows us to confirm and quantify the geographic differentiation in family patterns across the country. We also illustrate the links between family structure and a set of socioeconomic outcomes, in the short, medium, and long run.

Using rich Italian data for the period 2006-2014, we document sizeable gaps between native and immigrant households with respect to wealth holdings and financial decisions. Immigrant household heads hold less net wealth than native along the entire wealth distribution. Immigrant status reduces the likelihood of holding risky assets, housing, mortgages, businesses, and valuables, and it increases the likelihood of fi nancial fragility. Standard regression results are corroborated by a propensity score matching strategy. Years since migration, country of origin, and the pattern of intermarriage also matter. The Great Recession has worsened the condition of immigrants in terms of wealth holdings, home ownership, and fi nancial fragility. Results are unaffected if an immigrant is defi ned as a non-citizen, rather than a foreign-born.

Income inequality is a critical issue in both political and public debate. Educational attainment is a key causal factor of continuing inequality, since it influences human capital accumulation and, as a consequence, the unequal distribution of earnings. Educational inequality displays a racial dimension that is particularly persistent and difficult to eradicate through policy measures. Its roots lie in the colonial institution of slave labor, which was widespread in the US and Latin America up until the 19th century. However, the influence of slavery differs significantly across countries and between regions.

We study the determinants of intra-household decision-making responsibility over economic and financial choices using a direct measure provided in the 1989–2010 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We find that the probability that the wife is responsible for decisions increases as the wife's characteristics in terms of age, education and income become closer or even higher than those of her husband's. Thus, consistently with a bargaining approach, decision-making responsibility is associated with marriage heterogamy, and not only along strictly economic dimensions. However, in support of an alternative household production approach, we also find that the probability that the wife is responsible is lower when she is employed, which suggests the presence of a specialization pattern assigning responsibility to the spouse with more available time. Our results are robust to additional controls and alternative samples.

Bequest tax revenues have been declining in OECD countries for at least 70 years. We propose an explanation that is based on a dynamic politico-economic model where the evolution of bequest taxation is determined by wealth inequality. Since economic development induces a growing role of labor income and thus a reduction of wealth inequality, bequest taxation is reduced over time. The model also embeds a process of structural reallocation from agriculture to manufacturing and a consequent shift of the tax base from easy-to-tax land to hard-to-tax capital. This process implies a lower tax level and slower equalization-induced tax reduction, the higher is the tax avoidance rate and the less developed is the economy. The introduction of franchise restrictions which are gradually lifted over time allows the hump-shaped long-term evolution of bequest taxation to be reproduced starting from the nineteenth century for those countries that are now modern industrial democracies. The evolution of political institutions also helps to explain the discrepancies currently observed between tax systems in developed and underdeveloped countries.

A relevant question for the organization of large scale research assessments is whether bibliometric evaluation and informed peer review where reviewers know where the work was published, yield similar results. It would suggest, for instance, that less costly bibliometric evaluation might - at least partly - replace informed peer review, or that bibliometric evaluation could reliably monitor research in between assessment exercises. We draw on our experience of evaluating Italian research in Economics, Business and Statistics, where almost 12,000 publications dated 2004-2010 were assessed. A random sample from the available population of journal articles shows that informed peer review and bibliometric analysis produce similar evaluations of the same set of papers. Whether because of independent convergence in assessment, or the influence of bibliometric information on the community of reviewers, the implication for the organization of these exercises is that these two approaches are close substitutes.

We study the connection between inheritance systems and the historical evolution of the relationship between a society’s economic structure and its political system, with a focus on Europe from feudal times. The model predicts that, in an early agrarian phase, aristocratic political systems prevail, while democracies tend to emerge with industrialization. At the same time, as indivisible landed estates are replaced by capital as the primary source of wealth, the inheritance system evolves endogenously from primogeniture to partition. The dynamics of output, distribution, class structure and political participation are in turn reinforced by the system of intergenerational wealth transmission, with primogeniture tending to concentration and partition to equalization.

We study the evolution of an educational system founded on a hierarchical differentiation between vocational and general education, with vocational playing an inferior role in the society. The dynamics are best summarized by the ratio of the fraction of the population in vocational to that in general education, which we interpret as a measure of the degree of stratification of the society. We show that this ratio first rises and then declines with the level of development, displaying an inverted U-shape which reflects the complex interaction between economic and political forces, including aggregate income growth, wealth inequality and political participation.

We investigate the impact of 20th-century European colonization on growth. We 5nd that colonial heritage, as measured by the identity of the metropolitan ruler and by the degree of economic penetration, matters for the heterogeneity of growth performances in Africa. Colonial indicators are correlated with economic and sociopolitical variables that are commonly employed to explain growth and there are growth gains from decolonization. Colonial indicators also add signi5cant explanatory power to worldwide growth regressions and are correlated with the Sub-Saharan Africa and the Latin America dummies. c

We investigate the determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in a historical perspective with a focus on the influence of family structure. We capture the latter with two indicators: residential habits (nuclear versus complex families) and inheritance rules (partition versus primogeniture). After controlling for economic, institutional, religious, and cultural factors, we find that over the 1861–1901 period family structure is a driver of the education gender gap, with a higher female-to-male enrollment rate ratio in upper primary schools being associated with nuclear residential habits and equal partition of inheritance. We also find that only the effect of inheritance rules persists over the 1971–2001 period. (JEL codes: E02, H75, I25, J16, N33, O15).

We investigate the historical determinants of the education gender gap in Italy in the late 19th century, immediately following the country's Unification. We use a comprehensive newly-assembled database including 69 provinces over 20-year sub-samples covering the 1861–1901 period. We find robust evidence that in 1861, at Unification, gender equality in education is still positively associated with the medieval pattern of commerce, along the routes that connected Italian cities among themselves and with the rest of the world. The beneficial effect of medieval commerce on female education relative to male persists after we control for a broad set of confounding factors reflecting the geographic, economic, political, and cultural differentiation of medieval Italy. The long-term influence of medieval commerce dissipates only gradually after nationally-directed educational policies are implemented after Unification. This is consistent with the hypothesis that its transmission occurs through slow-changing cultural beliefs, as confirmed by further suggestive evidence of its influence on contemporary outcomes related to gender and family culture.

We consider a discrete-time, infinite-horizon, one-good stochastic growth model and we solve the central planner's optimization problem by developing a stochastic version of Pontryagin's maximum principle for Markov controls. An approximation method is used in order to extend to an infinite horizon the stochastic maximum principle derived by Arkin and Evstigneev (1987) for the finite-horizon case. We obtain efficiency conditions which are expressed in terms of stochastic multipliers, for which we provide an economic interpretation. We also apply the mathematical tool we develop to a central planner's problem in an overlapping-generations model.

We evaluate the empirical relevance of de facto vs. de jure determinants of political power in the U.S. South between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We apply a variety of estimation techniques to a previously unexploited dataset on voter registration by race covering the counties of Mississippi in 1896, shortly after the introduction of the 1890 voting restrictions encoded in the state constitution. Our results indicate that de jure voting restrictions reduce black registration but that black disfranchisement starts well before 1890 and is more intense where a black majority represents a threat to the de facto power of white elites. Moreover, the effect of race becomes stronger after 1890 suggesting that the de jure barriers may have served the purpose of institutionalizing a de facto condition of disfranchisement.

We study the evolution of racial educational inequality across US states from 1940 to 2000. We show that throughout this period, despite evidence of convergence, the racial gap in attainment between blacks and whites has been persistently determined by the initial gap. We obtain these results with 2SLS estimates where slavery is used as an instrument for the initial gap. We address the question of the excludability of slavery by instrumenting it with the share of disembarked slaves from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Using the same approach we also find that income growth is negatively affected by the initial racial gap in education and that slavery affects growth indirectly through this channel.

We study the evolution of racial educational inequality across US states from 1940 to 2000. We show that throughout this period, despite evidence of convergence, the racial gap in attainment between blacks and whites has been persistently determined by the initial gap. We obtain these results with 2SLS estimates where slavery is used as an instrument for the initial gap. The excludability of slavery is preliminarily established by instrumenting it with the share of disembarked slaves from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Using the same approach we also find that income growth is negatively affected by the initial racial gap in education and that slavery affects growth indirectly through this channel.

This essay investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda which accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors, but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from standard growth regressions, I analyze the role of Africa’s peculiar history, which has been marked by its colonization experience. Next I discuss the potential growth impact of state fragility, a concept which reflects multiple facets of the dysfunctions that plague the continent. The last topic I address is the influence, in and out of Africa, of the slave trades. The essay ends with critical conclusions and suggestions for further research.

We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions. First, we test the hypothesis that marriage represents - in a portfolio framework - a sort of safe asset, and that this effect is stronger for women. Controlling for a number of observable characteristics, we show that single women have a lower propensity to invest in risky assets than married females and males. Second, we show that the differential behavior of single women evolves over time, reflecting the increasing incidence of divorce and the expansion of female labor market participation. In particular, towards the end of our sample period, we observe a reduction in the gap between women with different family status, which can be attributed to the gradual erosion of the perception of marriage as a sort of safe asset. Our results therefore suggest that the differential behavior of single vs. married women is explained more accurately by the evolution of gender roles in society, rather than by exogenous and time invariant risk attitudes. Our empirical investigation is based on a dataset drawn from the 1989-2006 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth.

This chapter investigates the determinants of the growth performance of Africa. I start by illustrating a broader research agenda that accounts not only for basic economic and demographic factors but also for the role of history and institutional development. After reporting results from standard growth regressions, I analyze the role of Africa's peculiar history, which has been marked by its colonization experience. Next, I discuss the potential growth impact of state fragility, a concept that reflects multiple facets of the dysfunctions that plague the continent. The last topic I address is the influence, in and out of Africa, of the slave trades. The chapter ends with critical conclusions and suggestions for further research.

We present a model of monetary policy where the policymaker faces uncertainty about which he is learning in a Bayesian fashion. A fixed money supply rule is not optimal since the learning leads to adjustments in the monetary action. We present cases in which it is optimal to bear some cost in terms of current output performance in order to gain information that can be used in the formulation of future monetary policy: experimentation therefore pays. We also show that even passive learning without experimentation still leads to an activist monetary policy, i.e., one that is responsive to new information.

We develop a simple model in which government bonds are marketed at a present yield, rather than at a competitive one, and we study the consequences of this debt management choice on market equilibrium and the dynamics of debt accumulation. We show how equilibrium sequences with demand rationing are associated with interest costs that are higher than under competition and that supply rations are unsustainable. In the long run, if the debt manager follows an optimal policy in terms of service costs minimization and consistently responds to the signals represented by the rations, the economy converges to the competitive stationary state with no debt.

The literature on debt management has devoted little attention to the practice of floating debt using 'subscription issues', i.e., at a fixed price and quantity, even if this practice is rather common in many countries as an alternative to placement techniques that involve competitive bidding.' The focus of this paper is on this marketing strategy for a public debt manager facing uncertain market conditions. In particular, we consider a framework where government bonds are the only investment opportunity; the debt manager, therefore, holds monopoly power over the market for financial assets and solves his profitmaximisation problem by setting the price of the bonds in the face of an unobservable demand function. Intertemporal economic decisions under uncertainty can be modelled as multiperiod control problems: when the parameters of the true model are unknown, as in our case, a tradeoff typically arises between current profits and the value of information which can be extracted through price experimentation. In an 'active learning' framework, in particular, agents are assumed to use such information in order to update their stock of knowledge according to Bayes' rule.2 Several applications of the modelling strategy discussed above have been explored: for example, an 'active learning' setting can fit the description of the problem of a consumer facing the decision to buy a good with uncertain quality; alternatively, the same setting can be employed in order to investigate the behaviour of a monopolistic firm facing an unknown demand for its product. In this paper, we model the macroeconomic, policy-oriented issue previously illustrated as a stochastic, multiperiod control problem with learning; we therefore assume that debt policy, and in particular the debt manager's pricing strategy, is the result of the intertemporal maximisation of the government's objective function subject to a budget constraint, in a context where information is optimally employed in the decision process. In addition, the

We investigate the impact of slavery on the current performances of the US economy. Over a cross section of counties, we find that the legacy of slavery does not affect current income per capita, but does affect current income inequality. In other words, those counties that displayed a higher proportion of slaves are currently not poorer, but more unequal. Moreover, we find that the impact of slavery on current income inequality is determined by racial inequality. We test three alternative channels of transmission between slavery and inequality: a land inequality theory, a racial discrimination theory and a human capital theory. We find support for the third theory, i. e., even after controlling for potential endogeneity, current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites. To improve our understanding of the dynamics of racial inequality along the educational dimension, we complete our investigation by analyzing a panel dataset covering the 1940-2000 period at the state level. Consistently with our previous findings, we find that the educational racial gap significantly depends on the initial gap, which was indeed larger in the former slave states.

In this paper we study the evolution of citizenship laws around the world. Our analysis is based on a dataset we compiled to document such evolution in 162 countries in the 1948-2001 period. Our econometric results can be summarized as follows. The legal tradition, as represented by the application of jus soli rather than jus sanguinis, still exerts a persistent impact on current laws. Pressure from immigration tends to limit the application of jus soli. Among those factors that determine a more inclusive attitude we find instead the degree of democracy and demographic stagnation.

We investigates the link between fragility and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa over a yearly panel including 28 countries for the 1999-2004 period. Beside the conventional definition of fragility adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, we introduce the more severe definition of extreme fragility. We show that only the latter exerts a significantly negative impact on economic development, once standard economic, demographic, and institutional regressors are accounted for. As a by-product of this investigation we produce up-to-date evidence on the growth performance of the area. We find a tendency to convergence and no influence of geographic and historical factors.

This article explores the empirical determinants of state fragility in sub-Saharan Africa over the 1992–2007 period. Our dataset includes those sub-Saharan countries for which we have information on the distribution by quintiles of the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) ratings. We evaluate the potential influence on fragility of a wide range of economic, institutional, and historical variables. Among economic factors, we consider per-capita GDP, both in levels and growth rates, investment, natural resources, and schooling. We also consider economic policy variables such as government expenditures, trade openness, and inflation. Demographic forces are accounted for through the fertility rate, life expectancy, and the youth bulge. Institutional factors are captured by measures of ethnic fractionalization, civil liberties, revolutions, and conflicts, as well as governance indicators. Moreover, we select historical variables that reflect the colonial experience of the region, namely the national identity of the colonizers and the political status during the colonial period. Finally, we account for geographic factors such as latitude, access to sea, and the presence of fragile neighbors. Our central findings is that institutions are the main determinants of fragility: even after controlling for reverse causality and omitted variable bias, the probability for a country to be fragile increases with restrictions of civil liberties and with the number of revolutions. Before controlling for endogeneity, economic factors such as per-capita GDP growth and investment show some explanatory power, but economic prosperity displays a contradictory net impact since growth reduces fragility while investment facilitates it. Moreover, instrumental variables estimates show that per-capita GDP growth is no longer a significant factor. Colonial variables display a marginal residual influence: after controlling for all other factors former colonies are actually associated with a lower probability of being fragile.

We offer a rationale for the decision to extend the franchise to women within a politico-economic model where men are richer than women, women display a higher preference for public goods, and women's disenfranchisement carries a societal cost. Men and women are matched within households which are the center of the decision process. We derive the optimal tax rate under two alternative regimes: a males-only enfranchisement regime and a universal enfranchisement regime. The latter is associated with a higher tax rate but, as industrialization raises the reward to intellectual labor relative to physical labor, women's relative wage increases, thus decreasing the difference between the tax rates. When the cost of disenfranchisement becomes higher than the cost of the higher tax rate which applies under universal enfranchisement, the male median voter is better off extending the franchise to women. A consequent expansion of the size of government is only to be expected in societies with a relatively high cost of disenfranchisement. We empirically test the implications of the model over the 1870–1930 period. We proxy the gender wage gap with the level of per capita income and the cost of disenfranchisement with the presence of catholicism, which is associated with a more traditional view of women's role and thus a lower cost. The gender gap in the preferences for public goods is proxied by the availability of divorce, which implies marital instability and a more vulnerable economic position for women. Consistently with the model's predictions, women's suffrage is correlated positively with per capita income and negatively with the presence of catholicism and the availability of divorce, while women's suffrage increases the size of government only in non-catholic countries.

We study the determinants of international migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors other than economic and demographic fundamentals. We evaluate the impact of political institutions and of those institutions specifically targeted at attracting migrants. For a dataset on 19th century migration, we find that economic and demographic differentials play a major role, but that the quality of institutions also matter. We produce evidence that both political and migration institutions represent significant factors of attraction, even after controlling for their potential endogeneity through a set of instruments exploiting colonial history and the institutions inherited from the past.

We investigate the origin and evolution of the legal institution of citizenship from a political economy perspective. We compile a new data set on citizenship laws across countries of the world which documents how these institutions have evolved in the postwar period. We show that, despite a persistent impact of the original legislation, they have responded endogenously and systematically to a number of economic determinants, such as migration, the size of government, and the demographic structure of the population. Overall, a large stock of migrants decreases the probability of adoption of a mix of jus soli and jus sanguinis provisions, while it pushes jus sanguinis countries toward the adoption of jus soli elements. The welfare burden proves not to be an obstacle for a jus soli legislation, while demographic stagnation encourages the adoption of mixed and jus soli regimes. We also gauge the potential role of legal, political and cultural determinants, and find that a jus sanguinis origin is a factor of resistance to change, that a high degree of democracy promotes the adoption of jus soli elements while the instability of state borders associated with decolonization impedes it, and that cultural factors have no impact.

We study the determinants of 19th century mass migration with special attention to the role of institutional factors beside standard economic fundamentals. We find that economic forces associated with income and demographic differentials had a major role in the determination of this historical event, but that the quality of institutions also mattered. We evaluate separately the impact of political institutions linked to democracy and suffrage and of those institutions more specifically targeted at attracting migrants, i.e., citizenship acquisition, land distribution, and public education policies. We find that both sets of institutions contributed to this event, even after controlling for their potential endogeneity through a set of instruments exploiting colonial history and the quality of institutions inherited from the past.

We investigate the origin, impact and evolution of citizenship laws. Citizenship laws originate from the common and civil law traditions, which apply jus soli and jus sanguinis, respectively. We compile a dataset across countries of the world starting from the 19th century. The impact of the original, exogenously-given laws on international migration proves insignificant for the early, mass migration waves, which confirm to be driven primarily by economic incentives. Postwar convergence of citizenship laws is determined by legal tradition and international migration, but also by border stability, the establishment of democracy, the welfare burden, cultural factors and colonial history.