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Institutional Transplant and Cultural Proximity: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Prussia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2019

Giampaolo Lecce Open the ORCID record for Giampaolo Lecce [Opens in a new window]  and
Laura Ogliari
Giampaolo Lecce
Affiliation:
Giampaolo Lecce is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Nettelbosje 2 9747 AE Groningen. E-mail: [email protected]
Laura Ogliari
Affiliation:
Laura Ogliari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Economics Management and Quantitative Methods (DEMM) of the University of Milan, Via Conservatorio 7, 20122, Milan, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article presents evidence that cultural proximity between the exporting and the receiving countries positively affects the adoption of new institutions and the resulting long-term economic outcomes. We obtain this result by combining new information on pre-Napoleonic principalities with county-level census data from nineteenth-century Prussia. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment generated by radical Napoleonic institutional reforms and the deeply rooted cultural heterogeneity across Prussian counties. We show that institutional reforms in counties that are culturally more similar to France, in terms of religious affiliation, generate better long-term economic performance.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 79 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 1060 - 1093
Copyright
© The Economic History Association 2019 

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Footnotes

We thank the co-editor Dan Bogart and two anonymous referees for comments that helped substantially to improve the article. We are grateful to Alberto Alesina, Maristella Botticini, Rosario Crinò, Francesco Giavazzi, and Guido Tabellini for their invaluable supervision; Tommaso Aquilante, Davide Cantoni, Michela Carlana, Italo Colantone, Laura Doval, James Fenske, Nicola Gennaioli, Gunes Gokmen, Carl Hallmann, Christopher Koenig, Eliana La Ferrara, Joel Mokyr, Tommaso Nannicini, Tommaso Orlando, Santiago Maria Perez Vincent, Nicola Persico, Pierre-Charles Pradier, Severine Toussaert, and Ludger Woessmann for their useful comments, suggestions, and fruitful discussions; and participants of the ASREC 2017, CESifo Workshop on Political Economy, Econometric Society European Winter Meeting 2016, Oxford Development Economic Workshop, and EDGE Jamboree, and seminars at Università Bocconi, Yale University, and Birmingham Business School. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Fondazione Cariplo, and Università Bocconi.

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