My research projects share one common feature: make “economics” and “history” happily marry each other. In reverse chronological order:

Infinite gratitude to the European Research Council (ERC) for funding this project with an Advanced Research Grant.

Infinite gratitude to Nicoletta Baldini, Margherita Cinà and Beatrice Del Bo for outstanding research assistance at the States Archives of Florence, Genoa, Palermo, and the Archivio Datini in Prato.

"The Beauty of Uncertainty: The Rise of Insurance Contracts and Markets in Medieval Europe." The Journal of the European Economic Association (December 2023), with Pietro Buri and Massimo Marinacci. EEA Presidential Address. 

Link to the article here       Link to the slides here

Maritime insurance developed in medieval Europe is the ancestor of all forms of insurance that appeared subsequently. We address the question of why modern insurance was first invented in medieval Europe, and neither earlier nor elsewhere. Drawing from insights from the literature on uncertainty aversion, we show that medieval merchants had to bear more frequently natural risks (they traveled longer distances) and new human risks with unknown probabilities (they faced unpredictable attacks by corsairs due to increased political fragmentation and commercial competition in Europe). The increased demand for protection in medieval seaborne trade met the supply of protection by a small group of wealthy merchants with a broad information network who could pool risks and profit from selling protection through a novel business device: the insurance contract. A new market—the market for insurance—was then born. 

Next, analyzing more than 7,000 insurance contracts redacted by notaries and about 100 court proceedings housed in the archives of Barcelona, Florence, Genoa, Palermo, Prato, and Venice, we study the main features of medieval trade, the type of risks faced by merchants, and the characteristics of insurance contracts and markets from 1340 to 1500.The empirical analysis delivers two main findings. First, risks related to human activities (e.g., attacks by corsairs) seem to have had a relatively greater impact on insurance premia compared to natural risks (proxied by seasonal risks). Second, distance mattered but the route seems to have had a greater impact on insurance premia. Specific routes (e.g., in the Tyrrhenian and the western Mediterranean) were more plagued by human risks, which were harder to avoid for the majority of merchants who did not have a broad information network compared to the few wealthy merchants, who became the key players in selling insurance in the early stages of the development of insurance markets.  

Infinite gratitude to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for funding this research project.

This project, joint with Zvi Eckstein, has produced two articles (published in the Journal of Economic History 2005, and in the Journal of the European Economic Association 2007), two handbook chapters (in the New Palgrave Dictionary 2008, and in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Economics of Religion 2011), and a book, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492, published by Princeton University Press (August 2012), winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in the category of "scholarship", and translated into Chinese, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

The project is a journey back in time and across a territory spanning from Seville in Spain to Mangalore in India in order to uncover why the Jews became the people they did. The purpose of this passage through 1,500 years of Jewish history is to ask and answer a variety of questions. Why are there so few Jewish farmers? Why are the Jews an urban population of traders, bankers, financiers, lawyers, physicians, and scholars? When and why did these occupational and residential patterns become the distinctive marks of the Jews? Why did the Jewish population shrink from about 5.5 million at the time of Jesus to less than 1.2 million in the days of Mohammed? Why did the number of Jews reach its lowest level (less than 1 million) on the eve of the mass expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492–97? Why have the Jewish people been one of the most scattered diasporas in world history, living as a minority in cities and towns across the globe for millennia? When, how, and why did the Jews become "the chosen few"?

This project, joint with Zvi Eckstein and Anat Vaturi, has produced an article published in the Economic Journal (2019). We are currently writing a book under contract with Princeton University Press (expected publication date: Spring 2025). 

In this project we study one of the most remarkable instances in which religious norms and child care practices had a major impact: the history of the Jews in eastern Europe from 1500 to 1850. We show that while birth rates were about the same, infant and child mortality among Jews was much lower and account for the main difference in Jewish versus non-Jewish natural population growth. Jewish families routinely adopted child care practices that contemporary medical science has shown as enhancing children’s well-being.

Infinite gratitude to the National Science Foundation for funding this article with a CAREER NSF Grant. 

"Why Dowries?" American Economic Review (2003) with Aloysius Siow.

Price of Love: Marriage Markets in Comparative Perspective, under contract with Princeton University Press.

In the article, we ask and address a variety of questions: Why in many civilizations in the past (from ancient Mesopotamia to medieval Tuscany) parents gave dowries to their daughters at the time of the marriage and left bequests to their sons? Why do dowries survive today in some countries in South-East Asia whereas they have disappeared elsewhere?

The book project expands this line of research by using information from about 7,500 marriage and dowries contracts, as well as 4,500 wills, related to households living in Florence and rural villages from 1250 to 1435, which I collected at the State Archives of Florence. The goal is to understand how Tuscan people searched in the marriage market, how they matched, and to study the dual role of the dowry as a pre-morten inheritance from parents to daughters and as a price in the marriage market to find a suitable groom. In addition, the project will assess the short- and long-term impact of the Black Death of 1348 on marriage markets and bequest behavior.

"Endogenous Matching and the Empirical Determinants of Contract Form," Journal of Political Economy (2002), with Daniel A. Ackerberg.

The article uses information on principals (landlords), agents (tenants), and the type of agrarian contracts (sharecropping, fixed-rent, wage contracts) in early medieval Tuscany from primary sources collected at the State Archives of Florence to test some predictions of contract theory. The key novelty is that these data enable to control for the endogeneity problem that plagues most of the empirical literature on contract theory.