Four Essays on Italian Economic History: Human Capital and Innovation, 1815-1914

My dissertation is an empirical analysis of the causes and consequences of human capital and innovation patterns before, during, and after the Ital- ian Unification process. For more than half of the nineteenth century, Italy remained politically divided into different States. Political borders were re- moved after the Unification of 1861, but the economic, social, and cultural divides persisted and were even exacerbated after the Unification (Fenoal- tea 2011; Felice 2013). Human capital and innovation are widely acknowl- edged to be crucial factor endowments in developing countries. Innovation and human capital have been recognized as important factors of Italian long-term development by recent contributions summarised in Di Marti- no – Vasta (2017), but further investigation is needed to understand their role for the regionally uneven industrialization patterns of Italy. This work aims to provide new historical insights about the causes of the geographi- cally unequal industrialization trends of Italy, and about what factors were important for this evolution, by learning more about how human capital and innovative activity evolved from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I. Newly collected data and new methodological approaches inform each chapter of the thesis. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first section, which consists of the first two chapters, is concerned with mea- suring human capital and understanding its relationship to social mobility and gender issues. In this first part, I concentrate on the understudied Ris- orgimento period (1815-1861), when the social and political foundations for the Unification were set. The second section, which includes the re- maining two chapters, makes use of newly collected data sets to investigate the domestic and international determinants of Italian innovation patterns during the Liberal Age period (1861-1914).