Medieval Universities, Legal Institutions, and the Commercial Revolution
By Davide Cantoni, Noam Yuchtman. Social Science Research Network, 2012
228 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We present new data documenting medieval Europe’s “Commercial Revolution” using information on the establishment of markets in Germany. We use these data to test whether medieval universities played a causal role in expanding economic activity, examining the foundation of Germany’s first universities after 1386 following the Papal Schism. We find that the trend rate of market establishment breaks upward in 1386 and that this break is greatest where the distance to a university shrank most. There is no differential pre-1386 trend associated with the reduction in distance to a university, and there is no break in trend in 1386 where university proximity did not change. These results are robust to estimating a variety of specifications that address concerns about the endogeneity of university location. Universities provided training in newly-rediscovered Roman and canon law; students with legal training served in positions that reduced the uncertainty of trade in the Middle Ages. We argue that training in the law, and the consequent development of legal and administrative institutions, was an important channel linking universities and greater economic activity in medieval Germany.
Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8aaea8cdc715e565a46597d1c68b0b68878f0dd8
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Knowledge Production and Contradictory Functions in African Higher Education (2015, background): “A study by Cantoni and Yuchtman (2014) shows how the universities of Germany contributed to the economic growth of that country over 500 years ago.”
- Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany (2012, unknown): “Cantoni and Yuchtman (2012) kindly shared their data on medieval market charters and dates of incorporation. at U niversity of C hicago L ibrary on M ay 10, 2016 http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from T A B L E V II I C O R R E L A T E S O F M E D IE V A L J E W IS H S E T T L E M E N T A…”
- Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment (2015, unknown): “For example,Cantoni and Yuchtman (2014) show that university-trained lawyers played an importantrole in the establishment of markets during the “Commercial Revolution” in medieval Europe, andDittmar (2013) shows that during the same period, access to printed merchants’ manuals led to faster city…”