Pier Paolo Creanza

Publications

Institutions, trade and growth: the ancient Greek case of proxenia [Paper] [Replication kit] - Journal of Economic History, Volume 84, Issue 1 (Lead Article)

Recent scholarship contends that ancient Mediterranean economies grew intensively. An explanation is Smithian growth spurred by reductions in transaction costs and increased trade flows. This paper argues that an ancient Greek institution, proxenia, was among the innovations that allowed such growth in the period 500-0 BCE. Proxenia entailed a Greek city-state declaring a foreigner to be its ‘public friend’, a status that conferred both duties and privileges. Arguably, the functions performed by ‘public friends’ could facilitate economic transactions between communities. Accordingly, network and regression analyses establish a strong relation between proxenia grants and trade intensity.

Working papers

'Returning brains':  tax incentives, migration, and scientific productivity

This paper investigates how tax incentives for high-skill immigrants affect productivity. I collect data covering 90 percent of Italian faculty between 2000 and 2020 and use it to evaluate a 2004 tax break targeting researchers. First, the program induced substantial migration and positive selection of beneficiaries. Second, higher-productivity hires significantly increase their academic group's average productivity, roughly split between their direct contribution and indirect responses of local faculty. Third, this indirect effect is largely explained by higher-productivity local researchers sorting into the treated group, rather than by productivity spillovers on incumbent researchers.

Work in progress

Factories of Ideas? Big Business and the Golden Age of American Innovation

The changing spatial concentration of innovative activity
- with Pietro Buri

The Red Scare and racial inequality
- with Leah Boustan, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu