Funding

The Origins Project is supported by generous research grants listed below:

1) PRIN 2022:

Research project title: The Origins of the State: Evidence from Bronze Age Mesopotamia

Duration: 24 months

PIs: Carmine Guerriero, Barbara Luppi

Code: 2022SA485H 001

Proposal Abstract:
Despite the vast evidence on the relevance of the state's institutional capacity to provide public goods, enforce contracts, and properly protect property rights, we still lack an organic and empirically sound framework to understand its origins and impact. To help fill this gap, we propose to construct and analyze, through an innovative mix of methodologies borrowed from archaeology, Assyriology, economics, history, law, and political science, a novel data set on the first stable state institutions recorded in 44 major Mesopotamian polities between 3050 and 1750 BCE. Different from similar databases on medieval and modern societies, this data set is not only unaffected by the confounding impact of the European colonization but also displays large and detailed panel variation on economies sufficiently simple to credibly link economic incentives to institutional evolution. Our testable predictions originate from the idea that adverse production conditions push elites lacking the ability to commit to future transfers to share their decision-making power with nonelites endowed with complementary skills to convince them that a sufficient part of the returns on joint investments will be shared via public good provision. These reforms encourage cooperation. First, we will assess if negative production shocks also determined—through the adoption of a more inclusive political process—the state's fiscal capacity, intended as the elites’ ability to elicit the nonelites’ cooperation via the provision of valuable public goods. Different from the extant literature, we will capture the state’s fiscal capacity with measures of the inclusiveness of the fiscal policy design rather than the unobserved tax revenues and we will consider its exogenous geographic determinants. This subproject will unmask the technological forces that can drive the endogenous formation of the fiscal order in those developing, and especially most agricultural, countries where institutional transplantation has failed. Second, we will evaluate if reforms towards a more inclusive political process and/or a fall in preference heterogeneity, which we will capture with a smaller degree of ethnolinguistic diversity of the population, induced reforms towards a centralized legal order, i.e., a passage from judge-made law to statute law together with a shift from property rules to liability rules. To expunge the endogenous component of these institutional arrangements, we will rely on the exogenous components of their determinants, which are the farming return for the inclusiveness of the political process and the distance to the technological frontier, which we will capture with the time-varying locations from which metals were exported, for the degree of preference diversity. This subproject will help evaluate the vast program of legal reforms that have interested in the last decades developing, and especially most agricultural, jurisdictions.

2) FIS 2:

Research project title: Institutional Resilience to Climate Change: Lessons from Bronze Age Mesopotamia

Duration: 36 months

PIs: Carmine Guerriero

Code: FIS-2023-03231

Proposal Abstract:
Though the short-run effect of negative climate shocks has sadly become evident, their long-run institutional impact is still poorly understood. To clarify this issue, I propose to construct and credibly analyze, through an innovative mix of methodologies borrowed from archaeology, history, paleoclimatology, economics, law, and political science, the first comprehensive data set on the institutions developed by the first states recorded in Bronze Age Mesopotamia to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The key idea underlying my approach is that adverse—but not unbearable—droughts may push elites unable to commit to future transfers to grant strong political and property rights to the non-elites and the latter to favor these reforms by embracing cultural norms assuring a large intrinsic return on cooperation. While strong non-elites' rights convince them that a sufficient part of the returns on investing with the elites will be shared via public good provision, cultural accumulation increases the non-elites' investment payoff, allowing them to credibly commit to cooperation despite its limited return. Ultimately, moderate droughts should have shaped the 44 major Mesopotamian polities, part of my sample, and observed between 3050 and 1750 BCE, directly, via worse production conditions, and indirectly via three key institutional responses. First, inclusive political institutions should have fostered public good provision via a strong state's fiscal capacity. Second, strong non-elites' property rights to land should have favored farming innovations via a secure land tenure. Finally, a forceful culture should have supported farming and long-distance trade investments via a large intrinsic return on cooperation. To tackle endogeneity issues, I will consider the impact of sample selection, reverse causality, measurement errors, and unobserved heterogeneity. Finally, instead of simplistically formulating policy-relevant assessments of this past experience, I propose to employ my theory-based empirical approach to understand the institutional responses to climate change of present-day developing countries and, then, extract policy ramifications. This extension will help turn the INRES project into an enduring program on the interplay among climate change, state-building, and societal resilience.

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