Gary Cox and Valentin Figueroa - (ZOOM ONLY) The Communal Revolution, Assortative Matching, and Inventive Divergence
Modern studies in urban economics show that assortative matching and technological clusters are associated with strong productivity gains. We study the medieval roots of these phenomena. We argue that the communal revolution unleashed a distinctive type of inter-city competition that stratified European cities into technological leaders and laggards (per Kremer 1993). We then investigate (i) when elites first began to migrate toward elite clusters; and (ii) when highly-skilled elites’ marginal productivity first began to depend on their residence in technologically leading cities. All told, we provide new evidence that assortative matching and technological clustering emerged soon after the communal revolution in Western Europe and were important in fueling the unusually high innovativeness that scholars link to the Great Divergence.
Gary W. Cox, William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science. In addition to numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics, Cox is author of The Efficient Secret (winner of the 1983 Samuel H Beer dissertation prize and the 2003 George H Hallett Award), co-author of Legislative Leviathan (winner of the 1993 Richard F Fenno Prize), author of Making Votes Count (winner of the 1998 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the 1998 Luebbert Prize and the 2007 George H Hallett Award); co-author of Setting the Agenda (winner of the 2006 Leon D. Epstein Book Award), and author of Marketing Sovereign Promises (winner of the William Riker Prize, 2016). A former Guggenheim Fellow, Cox was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1983.
Valentin Figueroa is a Ph.D. candidate with an interest in comparative politics and political methodology.