Academic Dynasties: Decentralization, Civic Capital and Familism in Italian Universities

Transcription

1 Academic Dynasties: Decentralization, Civic Capital and Familism in Italian Universities Ruben Durante Giovanna Labartino Roberto Perotti November 2014 ABSTRACT Whether decentralization improves or worsen administrative performance depends on the level of civic capital of the targeted communities: in high-civiccapital areas, where local administrators are effectively monitored by active and informed citizens, decentralization will increase accountability; in low-civiccapital areas, instead, poorly monitored officials will use their increased power to favor their particular interests over the general one. We test this hypothesis by examining the effect of the decentralization of academic recruiting in Italy s public university system on the incidence of familism, i.e. favoritism towards relatives in academic hiring. We find that decentralization lead to a significant increase in familism in low-civic-capital areas but not in others. An earlier version of this paper circulated under the title: Academic Dynasties: Decentralization and Familism in the Italian Academia. Financial support from the European Research Council (Grant No ) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Alberto Alesina, Alberto Bisin, Francesco Caselli, Pedro Dal Bó, Andrea Ichino, Tommaso Nannicini, Fausto Panunzi, Michele Pellizzari, and Nicola Persico, seminar participants at Bocconi, Brown, Sciences Po, IMT Lucca, Trento, Bologna, Modena, ULB, NYU and Rotterdam and participants at the NBER 2011 Political Economy Summer Institute and at the 2011 Petralia Sottana Applied Economics Workshop for very helpful comments. Elia Boe, Chiara Fratto and Iván Torre provided outstanding research assistance. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Confindustria. Sciences Po. ruben.durante@sciencespo.fr Centro Studi Confindustria. giovanna.labartino@gmail.com IGIER - Bocconi University, CEPR, NBER. roberto.perotti@unibocconi.it (corresponding author) 1

2 1. INTRODUCTION Does administrative decentralization improve or deteriorate public good provision? Despite a large literature on the functioning of federal systems, this issue remains controversial. On the one hand, by bringing policy-making closer to the people decentralization can alleviate problems of asymmetric information and make it easier to tailor policies to local needs (Wallis and Oates, 1988; Fisman and Gatti, 2002; Faguet, 2004). On the other hand, by delegating power to local officials, decentralization may increase their capacity to predate public resources and to favor local special interests (Prud homme, 1995; Bardhan and Mookherjee, 2000; Treisman, 2000). An aspect that the literature has largely overlooked is how the ultimate effect of decentralization may depend on the socio-cultural characteristics of the communities to which power is devolved, and on how these, in turn, shape the incentives and motivations of local officials. Intuitively, decentralization is more likely to improve government performance where local administrators are effectively monitored by an active and informed citizenry, but may undermine it where public officials face little scrutiny and can use their increased power to benefit themselves, their family, or their clientèle. This paper explores this question by investigating the relation between decentralization and civic capital defined as those persistent and shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities (Guiso et al., 2010). 1 In particular, we test the hypothesis that in areas with strong civic traditions - where citizens are more engaged and informed and misconduct by local officials is more likely to be detected and stigmatized (Putnam et al., 1993) - decentralization improves administrative performance, while the opposite occurs in areas with low civic capital. From an empirical perspective, studying the relation between civic norms and decentralization is a complex task. On the one hand, time-series analyses are limited by the fact that both civicness and the degree of decentralization tend to be very per- 1 See (Guiso et al., 2010) for a comprehensive discussion of the concept of civic capital, its relation with the related notion of social capital, and a survey of the variables used in the empirical literature to proxy for both. 2

3 sistent over time. On the other, cross-country studies are generally problematic due to the endogeneity of cultural traits and the difficulty of comparing administrative performance across countries. To address these concerns, our empirical analysis exploits within-country variation and looks at the impact of a discontinuous change in the level of decentralization of one branch of administration on a particular type of outcome that exemplifies the tension between particularistic and general interests. Specifically, we investigate the effect of the 1998 reform of the public university system in Italy - which decentralized academic recruiting from the national to the local level - on the incidence of familism in academia, i.e. the practice of favoring relatives for academic jobs regardless of their qualifications. In particular, we test the conjecture that after the reform, university officials in low-civic-capital areas - more so than in high-civic-capital areas - used their increased power to favor their relatives over other possibly more competent candidates. Our analysis employs a novel dataset including comprehensive information on all academic personnel employed in Italian universities between 1988 and 2008, i.e. roughly ten years before and after the implementation of the reform. Since professors family connections are not directly observed, to measure the incidence of familism across academic departments we exploit the informative content of professors last names. In particular, we construct two indices of homonymy - i.e. the presence of multiple professors with the same last name in the same department - that we use as proxy for the presence of relatives. 2 Crucially, our measures of homonymy are based on the comparison between the relative frequency of last names in a department and in the general population; this is to ensure that they genuinely capture abnormal levels of homonymy, and not just the presence of relatively common last names. To measure differences in civic capital across universities, following Putnam et al. (1993), we use the readership of non-sport newspapers in the province where a university is located. This variable seems especially well-suited to capture the public awareness dimension of civic engagement emphasized above; indeed, it represents a good proxy for citizens willingness to bear the private cost of acquiring informa- 2 The free Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines homonymy as the quality or state of being homonymous, and homonymous as having the same designation. 3

4 tion to improve the quality of collective decision-making, and make public scrutiny of local officials more effective. Our findings provide support for the view that the effect of decentralization depends on the level of civic capital. Indeed, our results document that after the reform familism increased significantly in areas with low civic capital, but not in those with high civic capital. The differential effect of decentralization on familism is sizeable, very robust to the use of different measures of homonymy and different specifications, and to controlling for both year and department fixed effects, as well as for time-varying department size. Furthermore, and quite crucially, the effect does not appear to be driven by any pre-existing trend, or by differences in other relevant characteristic - such as education, income, employment, North/South differential - that could potentially be correlated with both civic capital and familism. This result is further reassuring that newspaper readership is picking up the effect of civic capital and not its spurious correlation with socio-economic development. Finally, we find little evidence that the effect of decentralization varied across disciplines, a result which suggests that even disciplines in which performance can arguably be measured with more precision (e.g. hard sciences) are not immune from familism. Our work relates to various streams of literature. First and foremost, our paper contributes to the above-mentioned literature on decentralization in federal systems by providing novel evidence that the effect of decentralization on administrative performance can vary across jurisdictions depending on the ability of local citizens to monitor officials and keep them accountable. In this respect, our research is especially related to recent work by Boffa et al. (2013) who, in the context of a political agency model with rent-seeking politicians and heterogeneously informed voters, show that centralization reduces rent extraction and benefits each region in inverse proportion to its residents level of information. As an indirect test of their theory, the authors document that, following the enactment of the Clean Air Act - which centralized environmental policy in the U.S. from the state to the federal level - pollution decreased faster in states with less informed citizens. Though close in spirit, our contribution differs from Boffa et al. (2013) in that we examine the effect of decentralization on the behavior of non-elected officials, and look at very 4

5 different policy domain and outcome. Our paper also relates to the large literature on civic (or social) capital, namely to the work by Banfield and Banfield (1958), Putnam et al. (1993), and Alesina and Giuliano (2011) that highlight the negative relationship between civic capital and the strength of family ties. In the context of this literature, our work also relates to two recent studies on the relation between civic capital and political accountability (Nannicini et al., 2013; Padro-i Miquel et al., 2012). Focusing on Italy, Nannicini et al. (2013) show that electors in districts with high civic capital are more willing to punish congressmen for their misbehavior, i.e. criminal prosecution and absenteeism in Parliament votes. 3 Similarly, looking at the introduction of village elections in China, Padro-i Miquel et al. (2012) document that elections have a significant positive effect on public goods expenditure and provision but only in villages with high levels of civic capital. What differentiate our contribution from this work is the focus on the interaction between civic capital and decentralization, and the extension of the accountability argument to non-elected public officials. Our study also relates to previous work on the importance of family connections for job search. In particular, our findings dovetail nicely with evidence by Sylos Labini (2004) who, focusing like us on Italy, finds that in areas with low civic capital individuals rely more on family connections to find employment. Other contributions have instead examined the role of family connections within specific professions. A relevant example is Dal Bo et al. (2009) who investigate the presence of political dynasties in the U.S. Congress since Our research is also related to a large literature in corporate governance on the effect of family ownership and family management on firm performance which we discuss in detail in the next section. Finally, from a methodological point of view, our paper relates to previous contributions that use last names to identify family connections. Example include Angelucci et al. (2010) who use last names to identify family ties among recipients of Mex- 3 Relatedly, in a recent study on the presence of political budget cycles in local taxation decisions in Italy, Alesina and Paradisi (2014) document that municipalities choose lower tax rates close to elections and that this effect is especially pronounced in southern regions. To the extent that localities in the South are characterized by lower levels of civic capital than in the North, the authors argue that their findings can be explained by the fact that local politicians in the South face less public scrutiny. 5

6 ico s Progresa program, Acemoglu et al. (2008) who use first and last names of municipalities mayors to measure political concentration in their historical study of Colombia s region of Cundinamarca, and Guell et al. (2007) who exploit the informative content of last names to study intergenerational mobility in Catalonia. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we review some arguments and evidence of why strong family ties may improve or deter efficiency in organizations, and explain why it is likely that familism has a negative rather than a positive impact on the allocation of human capital in the Italian academia. Section 3 provides some background information on the Italian academic system and on the reform that decentralized academic recruitment from the national to the local level, and presents some anecdotal evidence of the presence of familism in Italian universities. Section 4 describes the data used in our empirical analysis and the procedure employed to construct the measures of homonymy. Section 5 describes our empirical strategy, and section 6 our main findings. Section 7 concludes. 2. IS FAMILISM GOOD OR BAD? Whether strong family ties improve or deter efficiency in organizations is unclear and likely to be context-specific. For example, a large literature in corporate finance has investigated the impact of family ownership and family management on firm efficiency, highlighting possibly contrasting effects. In theory, family connections may, on the one hand, alleviate the classic agency problems between managers and owners; on the other hand, however, family ownership may reduce the pool of viable candidates for management positions, and the incentives of designated heirs to invest in human capital - the so-called Carnegie effect. 4 Empirical evidence on the effect of family ownership on firm performance is rather mixed. Van Reenen and Bloom (2007) attribute a large portion of the gap in management practices between U.S. and France to the different incidence of family management in the two countries. Relatedly, Caselli and Gennaioli (2013) show that inheritance of firm control across generations can result in large inefficiencies, 4 The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth generally deadens the talents and energies of the son, and tempts him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would... (Carnegie, 1962, p. 56). 6

7 and Anderson and Reeb (2003) find that family-owned companies are characterized by lower Tobin s q ratio than comparable ones. In contrast, Holderness and Sheehan (1988) find that in the U.S. family-owned companies have a higher q ratio. Along these lines, Adams et al. (2009); Fahlenbrach (2009) and Morck et al. (2000) document that U.S. and Canadian companies with founding-ceos have higher evaluations than comparable ones. There is more consensus, instead, on the effect of descendant management in family firms. Looking respectively at the U.S. and Canada Pérez-González (2006) and Smith and Amoako-Adu (1999) find that share prices of family firms fall when descendants are appointed as managers. Similarly, looking respectively at U.S. and Thai firms, Villalonga and Amit (2006) and Bertrand et al. (2008) find that descendant management destroys value in family firms. Two exceptions are the studies by Sraer and Thesmar (2007) and Barontini and Caprio (2006) which do not find evidence of worse performance in descendant-managed firms. Whatever the rationale for a positive influence of family control on company efficiency, it is hard to believe this could apply to the case of familism in academia. The primary reason is that the sort of information asymmetry family ownership helps overcome is unlikely to arise in academic recruitment since professional ability - i.e. research performance - can be measured quite accurately via publication record and bibliometric scores. In contrast, academic familism is likely to produce a Carnegie effect since family members will expect to be subject to less stringent selection standards and will be less prone to accumulate human capital. In addition, the belief that family connections is all that matters to be hired in academia will presumably deter human capital accumulation also among unconnected outsiders who will perceive a lower expected return of their investment. Although the relation between familism and academic performance is not the focus of this study, in the last part of our empirical section we will discuss some evidence that corroborates the view that, in the context of Italy, departments with higher incidence of familism fair worse than others in terms of research achievement. 7

8 3. BACKGROUND: THE ITALIAN UNIVERSITY SYSTEM 3.1. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SYSTEM As of 2008 the Italian university system consisted of 74 public universities and 15 private ones. Recruitment and promotion of academic personnel in both categories of institutions is regulated by the same legal framework. Academic positions are organized in three level of seniority: assistant professor (AP), associate professor (AsP), and full professor (FP). Depending on their field of specialization, professors are assigned to one of fourteen areas, 5 and, within these, to one or more sub-areas. 6 Public competitions for recruiting and promotion of academic personnel are organized at the sub-area level. However, focusing on sub-areas is problematic because, even in the largest universities, a sub-area may include only a handful of professors; in addition, the same professor may be affiliated with multiple sub-areas. For this reason, in our empirical analysis we will use the area as unit of analysis. In particular, with a slight abuse of terminology, we will refer to a department as the set of professors in a given university affiliated to the same area. Overall, our data, described in detail in section 4, include information on a balanced panel of 564 departments in 57 universities over the period 1988 to RECRUITMENT, PROMOTIONS AND THE 1998 REFORM An important feature of the Italian university system is that professors salaries are largely determined by seniority. For a given seniority, all academic personnel in the same rank level - APs, AsPs, and FPs - receive the same salary, with automatic and uniform pay rises every two years. Only the promotion from one rank level to 5 The fourteen areas are: civil engineering and architecture, industrial engineering and information technology, agriculture and veterinary, biology, chemistry, ancient studies, philology, literature and art history, natural sciences, economics and statistics, physics, law, mathematics and computer science, medicine, political and social sciences, history, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology. 6 For example, the area economics and statistics is divided into the following fifteen sub-areas: political economy, economic policy, public finance, applied economics, econometrics, business economics, business management, business organization, economics of financial intermediaries and corporate finance, commodities studies, economic history, statistics, economic statistics, demography and social statistics, mathematics for economics and finance. 8

9 the next is not automatic but is determined, like the initial recruitment, via public competition (concorso). Our paper exploits a nationwide change in the procedures regulating these competitions. Until 1998, academic recruitment and promotions were highly centralized: a nationwide competition was held for each sub-area at irregular intervals (usually every three or four years), and all individuals aspiring to be hired or promoted would apply. For each competition, a nationwide selection committee, elected by all professors in that sub-area, would evaluate applicants and determine which ones were eligible to be hired or promoted (idonei). Typically, the number of candidates deemed eligible was somewhat higher than the combined number of openings in that sub-area in all universities, so that each university was able to pick one. This system offered ample opportunities for corruption and manipulation (especially to the most senior and influential members of the profession), as attested by ample anecdotal evidence of the horse-trading that traditionally accompanied national competitions. Usually, each member of the national selection committee would offer to support candidates sponsored by other committee members in exchange for their support of her own protegé(s). Such collusive conduct was facilitated by the fact that the number of winners was usually larger than the number of committee members, so that each member was virtually guaranteed that the candidate(s) she backed would be selected. 7,8 In 1998 the Italian parliament approved a reform of the university system which decentralized academic recruitment and promotions from the national to the university level. One of the purposes of the reform was precisely to limit the distortions of the centralized system described above. According to the new law, a department willing to fill a vacancy was required to organize its own local public competition. The local selection committee would be composed by five members: an internal one, appointed by the local department, and four external ones, elected among all pro- 7 Indeed, the prospect of influencing the outcome of the competition was often the biggest incentive to take up the unpaid and onerous task of committee member. 8 It is worth noting that, in some cases, candidates not sponsored by committee members could also be declared eligible; indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that, once the success of the insiders had been ensured, the remaining slots were assigned to outsiders based primarily on scientific merit. 9

10 fessors in the sub-area in the country. The committee would evaluate candidates and select three eligible ones who, for the following two years, could be appointed by any university in the country to fill a vacancy at the same rank level in the same sub-area. Decentralization did not deter horse-trading and collusion; if anything, it extended them to professors from smaller universities who had traditionally had little influence on national competitions. With the new system a department would initiate a public competition only if it had a reasonable expectation that its preferred candidate - almost invariably a local insider - would be among the winners. Prior to the competition, the hosting department would informally communicate to the outside which candidate it would support (and expect to win), and would endorse friendly colleagues to join the selection committee to ensure that would occur. The main difference with respect to the national competition was that, with the new rules, the quid pro quo was inter-temporal rather than simultaneous: A s support for B s candidate in B s competition today in exchange for B s support for A s candidate in A s competition tomorrow. 9 Crucially, while the 1998 reform revolutionized recruitment and promotion procedures, it left other aspects of the organization of universities virtually unchanged. In particular, universities funding continued to rely on transfers from the central government largely based on historical parameters and unrelated to universities current performance. Similarly, professors salaries remained undifferentiated and solely based on seniority. This implied that any manipulation of the hiring process by local university officials aimed at favoring some candidates over others would have no impact on the overall resources available to the university or on the salaries of current and new professors. In sum, the reform gave more discretion to local university officials, potentially expanding opportunities for favoritism in hiring and promotion, without raising the private costs of such behavior. A look at the outcome of some of the post-reform competitions illustrates to what extent these were heavily swayed in favor of insiders, i.e. candidates from the university that initiated the competition. Table 1, from Perotti (2008), reports statistics 9 Another relevant feature of local competitions is that, unlike the national one, the number of committee members exceeded the number of winners. As a consequence, it was more likely that only candidates sponsored by committee members would prevail, while little room remained for the sort of high-quality outsiders that sometimes succeeded in national competitions. 10

11 on forty public competitions for the rank of full professor in the area of economics held with the new rules. These competitions delivered a total of 117 eligible candidates, 91 of whom were ultimately appointed to open positions. Overall, 57% of insiders were declared eligible against only 27% of outsiders, and, eventually, 44% of insiders were appointed by the university that initiated the competition against only 5% of outsiders. Furthermore, whenever a candidate from another university was declared eligible in a competition, almost invariably one or more of the external members in the selection committee would be from that same university. Obviously, this table does not prove that the selection process became less efficient, or that the selected candidates were less qualified with the decentralized recruitment system. In theory, decentralization could make the recruitment process more efficient by alleviating problems of asymmetric information about candidates quality, and by allowing universities to better tailor hiring decisions to their specific teaching and research needs. On the other hand, decentralization could lead to more inefficient outcomes by allowing local officials to use their increased discretion to benefit themselves, their family, or their clientèle. This is especially likely to happen when economic incentives to hire the most productive candidates are absent, and in areas with low civic capital where public scrutiny of local officials is deficient. Our study investigates how decentralization influenced the conduct of local university officials by focusing on one specific and extreme form of uncivic behavior: familism, defined as the practice of favoring family members in academic hiring and promotion independently of their actual qualifications. In particular, we test the hypothesis that, after the reform, familism in academic recruitment increased disproportionately more in departments in areas with low civic capital. In what follows we start by discussing anecdotal evidence of the importance of family connections in the Italian academia FAMILY CONNECTIONS IN THE ITALIAN ACADEMIA Familism is a widespread phenomenon in the Italian academia. Cases of familism involving university officials at the highest level are regularly covered by Italian media and, over the years, the issue has been the object of a lively public debate. Table 2 summarizes a series of cases in which close relatives of top university officials - 11

12 i.e. university provosts and department heads - were hired or promoted during the mandate of the these officials. 10 For each instance, the table reports: i) the name of the university, ii) the university s rank in terms of number of students, iii) the position of the university official, iv) the period during which (s)he was in office, v) the relation between the official and the individual that was hired/promoted, vi) the rank to which this person was hired/promoted, vii) whether the two were part of the same department. For example, the first case is that of the University of Rome La Sapienza where the son of the current provost - who was recruited as AP and promoted to AsP in the department of medicine while his father was head of the department - was promoted to FP while his father was provost. 11 Similarly, a son and two daughters of his two predecessors were recruited and promoted while their respective fathers were in office. Overall, the table reports fifty-five cases of familism recorded in 18 of the 57 universities in our sample - including six of the ten largest ones - located in the North, the Center, and the South. These episodes concerned mainly children of top officials (37) and, less often, children-in law (8), niblings (7), or spouses (3). There are several reasons why these numbers are likely to underestimate the true extent of the phenomenon. First, they do not include similar cases occurred prior to Second, being based on news reports, this list is likely to miss similar cases occurred in smaller universities which are generally subject to less media scrutiny. Third, we restrict our attention to cases occurred while provosts and chairs were in office thus omitting those instances in which their relatives may have been favored either before or after this time. Finally and most notably, since ordinary professors who never become provost or chair are also in the position to influence hiring decisions, the incidence of familism is likely to be larger than these prominent cases suggest. An example of how endemic familism can be is represented by the department of economics of the University of Bari, whose network of family connections as of 2007 is depicted in Figure 1. Overall, out of the 173 members of the department in 2007, 53 had at least one close relative in the department, with the two most repre- 10 We define close relatives as: spouse, children, niblings, children-in-law. 11 The provosts wife is also FP in the same department, while his daughter was promoted to AsP and then to FP in the university s second department of Medicine while her father was chair of the first one 12

13 sented families accounting for seven members each. Although this is admittedly an extreme case, it is by no means an isolated one. For example, in 2008 an article in a main national newspaper on familism in the University of Palermo reported that in the department of medicine out of 384 members of 58 had at least one close relative in the department (La Repubblica, 2008); numbers were similarly striking for the departments of law (21 out of 174), agriculture (23 out of 126), and engineering (18 out of 180). An analogous picture emerged for the University of Messina from the investigation of another national newspaper: 23 close relatives out of 63 members in the department of veterinary science, 100 out of 531 in medicine, and 27 out of 75 in law (Il Fatto Quotidiano, 2010). 4. DATA AND MEASURES OF FAMILISM The numerous anecdotes discussed above suggest that episodes of familism are widespread in the Italian academia. Yet, providing rigorous quantitative evidence of the scope of this phenomenon - and of its relation with local civic capital - is a challenging task for at least two reasons. First, objective information on professors family connections is simply not available. Second, even self-reported measures of family ties, if available, would not be reliable since, precisely where family connections are more pervasive, concerned individuals would presumably be less inclined to reveal this information. To overcome these difficulties in this paper we infer the incidence of family connections in a department from the number of faculty members with the same last name ( homonymy ). The immediate advantage of this approach is that it allows to look at the entire Italian university system since comprehensive information on the last names of all academic personnel is publicly available. An obvious caveat is that the degree of homonymy is likely to measure the incidence of familism in a given department only imperfectly. On the one hand, a measure of within-department homonymy can overestimate familism by counting cases in which individuals with the same last name are not actually related. On the other hand, however, it may underestimate the phenomenon by failing to account for relatives with different 13