Venise, vacances obligent

La traversée en gondole de Venise vous fait rêver, vous admirez le palais des doges et la démocratie qui s'y est installée dans un moyen-âge ailleurs sombre... bref vous êtes un peu romantique! Voici une étude qui pourrait, suivant celle/celui qui vous écoute, vous faire paraître soit intéressant(e), soit ennuyeux(xse). Voici l'abstract:

International trade can have profound effects on domestic institutions. We examine this proposition in the context of medieval Venice circa 800–1350. We show that (initially exogenous) increases in longdistance trade enriched a large group of merchants and these merchants used their newfound
muscle to push for constraints on the executive i.e., for the end of a de facto hereditary Doge in 1032 and for the establishment of a parliament or Great Council in 1172. The merchants also pushed for remarkably modern innovations in contracting institutions (such as the colleganza) that facilitated largescale mobilization of capital for risky longdistance trade. Over time, a group of extraordinarily rich merchants emerged and in the almost four decades following 1297 they used their resources to block political and economic competition.
In particular, they made parliamentary participation hereditary and erected barriers to participation in the most lucrative aspects of long distance trade. We document this ‘oligarchization’ using a unique database on the names of 8,103 parliamentarians and their families’ use of the colleganza. In short, longdistance trade first encouraged and then discouraged institutional dynamism and these changes operated via the impacts of trade on the distribution of wealth and power.

L'article est de Puga et Trefler, International Trade and Institutional Change: Medieval Venice’s Response to Globalization. CEPR august 2012
Pour mieux connaître le thème de recherche de Diego Puga, voici une courte video.