Project description
The role of migration in long-term economic growth
International migration has marked human evolution since the beginning, posing questions about whether these movements were responsible for economic development and growth. The EU-funded HMTG project will test the hypothesis that direct contact between persons impacts choices and technologies. It will study interactions between locals and foreigners as well as the role of cities’ ethnic composition in shaping global altruism and investigate the role of local interactions between Assyrian merchants in the Bronze Age in the rise of ancient firms and trade, between travellers in the rise of Neolithic cities and between dwellers and travelling merchants in the development of new cities in 13th century France. Moreover, it will study migration and trade effects on the spread of technology over millennia and the role of language and writing in measuring well-being in the short and long run.
Objective
Do international migrations foster economic dynamism and growth? Does the presence of immigrants and their descendants alter the attitudes and actions of natives towards foreigners? How do cities emerge and survive? Does economic growth increase wellbeing in the long run? These are but a few of the questions that I explore in this proposed research.
The unifying theme of this research is to test the hypothesis that direct contact between individuals affects preferences and technologies. This research is articulated around eight distinct projects, each exploring this hypothesis from different angles, at different points in time, and over different horizons. The unifying methodology is to use historical data. Using data spanning the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Middle Age, and modern history, working with a team composed of both economists and historians, combining a variety of theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions, I answer the following questions:
Do migrants contribute to local innovation and growth (project 1.1)? Does the presence of neighbors of foreign ancestry alter the attitudes of local residents towards foreigners (project 1.2)? How does the ethnic composition of cities shape the geography of global altruism (project 1.3)? How do local interactions between Assyrian merchants in the Bronze Age affect the emergence of ancient firms (coalitions) and aggregate trade (project 2.1)? Can the local interactions between travellers explain the emergence of cities in the Neolithic (project 2.2)? Do local interactions between city dwellers and traveling merchants explain the survival and growth of new cities in 13th Century France (project 2.3)? How do migration and trade flows affect the diffusion of technology over millennia (project 3.1)? And finally, as language is the key medium through which individuals interact, how to use written words to quantify the growth in wellbeing in the short and long run (project 3.2)?
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
75341 Paris
France