Contacts
Research Economics

At the Birth of Maritime Insurance

, by Claudio Todesco
The ERC project of Maristella Botticini will analyse thousands of contracts stipulated in Medieval Italy to understand how the insurance market was born

What happens when the "microscope" of historical analysis meets the "telescope" of economic analysis? "A happy marriage", says Maristella Botticini (Department of Economics), Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Contracts, Institutions, and Markets in Historical Perspective, hosted by IGIER - Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research.

Imagine a novel exploration of thousands of maritime insurance contracts for the 14th, 15th and late 16th century housed at the Archivio Datini in Prato and the State Archives of Florence, Geneva, and Palermo. Imagine a software developed to make this dataset available to the scientific community. These are just a few features of a project focused on marine insurance contracts developed in medieval Italy and that later spread all over Europe: they are the "fathers" of all insurance contracts and they contributed to the growth of international trade. The project is about to provide answers to some questions: how does "a market" emerge? Why did these contracts first develop in the Middle Ages and not before? How did they compute insurance premia without having the formal notion of probability?

"The key novelty of this project stems from combining contract theory with information from thousands of insurance contracts between 1300 and 1550", Botticini says. "Genoese, Tuscan, Sicilian and Venetian merchants pioneered many features of international trade".

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