A story of family firms
Abstract
Does agricultural organization shape the process of industrialization? This paper investigates the long-run persistence of pre-industrial agrarian institutions on the structure of Italian manufacturing at the dawn of the twentieth century. Exploiting variation in the prevalence of sharecropping and day-labour contracts across Italian districts from the 1901 Agricultural Census, I examine if these contrasting labour arrangements shaped the formation of family firms, as recorded in the first Industrial Census 1911.