Abstract
This paper considers how the foundation of the first universities in Italy affected the emergence of free city-states (the communes) in the period 1000–1300 CE. Exploiting a panel dataset of 121 cities, we show that the time variant distance of the sample cities to their closest university is inversely correlated with the probability of their transition to communal institutions. Our evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the medieval universities provided the useful juridical knowledge and skills for building legal capacity and developing communal institutions.
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