Scholars and Literati at the Philosophical Society & Royal Society of Edinburgh (1731-1800)

David de la Croix, Elise Delvaux — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This note summarizes our research into the group of scholars and literati who were at the Philosophical Society and at the Royal Society of Edinburgh from its early meetings to 1800.

Are Scholars’ Wages Correlated with their Human Capital?

David de la Croix, Frédéric Docquier, Alice Fabre, Robert Stelter — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout our project on premodern academia, we use a heuristic human capital index to measure each scholar’s quality. This index is built by combining several statistics from individual Wikipedia and Worldcat pages. The question we address here is whether this measure is correlated with the actual wages professors received. This note is a technical appendix to our paper on the academic market (De la Croix et al. 2020) but also has an interest as a stand-alone publication.

There is considerable evidence that compensations for academic contractswentwell beyond paid salaries.1 They included payments from students, prebends,2 and many forms of in-kind benefits. Yet, it is interesting to examine the relationship between scholars’ human capital and existing data on monetary remunerations. Such remunerations have been used by Dittmar (2019) to show that professor salaries increased significantly relative to skilled wages after printing spread, with science professors benefiting from the largest salary increases. In the two sections below, we first review the available data on salaries, and argue that such data are imperfect proxies for the overall remuneration for academic services (i.e. a scholar’s market value). Keeping in mind such limitations, we then
document a positive correlation between monetary income and scholars’ human capital.

Measuring Human Capital: from WorldCat Identities to VIAF

Matthew Curtis, David de la Croix — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This note is a summary of how we can measure scholars’ human capital after the retirement of theWorldCat Identities project on March 23, 2023. WorldCat Identities was previously providing us measures of scholars’ output and recognition.

Repertorium eruditorum totius Europae

Scholars and Literati at the Philosophical Society & Royal Society of Edinburgh (1731-1800)

Are Scholars’ Wages Correlated with their Human Capital?

Measuring Human Capital: from WorldCat Identities to VIAF