Wealth and Inheritance in Modern Italian History (WeInIt) Project

WeInIt in a nutshell

Wealth – its amount, composition, distribution – is a crucial component of wellbeing and prosperity. Recent research in history and social sciences highlighted its crucial role in the extent, political economy and intergenerational transmission of economic and social inequalities. However, our understanding of the historical evolution of personal wealth and its distribution in Modern Italy remains severely limited. We lack any guess on the evolution of wealth inequality in 1915-70 – a crucial period for Italian economic development, and of turbulent social and political transformation – including the Fascism regime; nor we have no evidence on crucial aspects, such as the composition and origins of the Italian elite; the gender gaps in wealth and inheritance; the regional components of these divides. This strongly limits our understanding of the evolution of inequality in Italy, and more broadly of the functioning of our capitalism and democracy.

By creating a new micro-dataset on the wealth transmitted at death by Italians from the Napoleonic period to the end of the Economic Miracle, WeInIt will fill this gap. Building on new data, a mix of established and new methodologies, and the creation of an interdisciplinary research group, WeInIt aims at delivering: 

1) new series of wealth inequality for the 1815-1970 period, comparable to those already available from the economic history literature for 1300-1800, those recently advanced for 1861-1913, and the modern evidence, available only from the 1970s; 

2) the first estimates of gender wealth gaps in Italy, over the same period – a great contribution to the international literature, which is almost silent on these divides in history ; 

3) a longitudinal database on wealth intergenerational transmissions, to study social mobility, and possibly, empirically test of the impact of macro and policy shocks (such as World Wars, depressions, changes in taxation ); 

4) a historical rich list, to track the richest Italian over the long 20th century; 

5) alongside these quantitative aspects, WeInIt will also reconstruct the intellectual and social history of inequality, wealth and inheritance in Italy– from the economic debate to the political struggles around property and redistribution – to fully understand the evolving meaning of wealth over the last 150 years and question the reciprocal interaction between wealth perception and redistribution.

As a result, we – Italy, and its many family stories – will be placed in the broader history of wealth inequality.

More information on the project will follow soon!

Irregular updates on the daily activities of the WeInIt project will be shared on my Linkedin profile.