Simone Moriconi (IESEG School of Management)
Thomas Baudin, Tommaso DÂ’Amelio and Paula Gobbi
Why did Italians start migrating out from Italy in the early nineteenth century? This paper studies the role played by the abolition of a legal institution allowing inheritance to remain undivided across generations on the probability to migrate. We first develop a partial equilibrium static model to show how variations in inheritance schemes may alter the migration process by relieving liquidity constraints. We then exploit the quasi natural experiment provided by the Napoleonic invasion on Italian territories to perform a difference-in-differences analysis. To do so, we build three novel datasets: one on the use of impartible inheritance at pre-unitary state level, one on inheritance practices among noble families, and one on migration before the unification of Italy, obtained through genealogical data. Our estimates suggest that exposure to the change from impartible to partible inheritance led to an increase in the probability of migrating between 7 and 15 percentage points. Our data on nobility allows to point out that this effect is concentrated among offsprings of families (generally Nobles), who were indeed subject to the impartible (Fedecommessi) regime. Finally, we show that the change in inheritance allowed to reach most distant destinations, North America in particular, suggesting that the regime switch effectively entailed an income shock.