Landownership concentration and human capital in Italy: Evidence from municipalities, 1911-1921

This paper examines how literacy growth across Italian municipalities varied with local agrarian structure during the decade of the Daneo-Credaro school reform. We assemble a new full-coverage municipal dataset of literacy rates from the 1911 and 1921 population censuses and link it to landownership concentration measured in the first national agricultural census (holdings in 1929), which we use as a proxy for persistent local agrarian structure. The Daneo-Credaro reform marked an important reorganization of primary schooling, shifting finance and oversight away from municipalities and toward the state and intermediate administrative bodies, while preserving local representation in governance. Using a conservative two-period framework, we compare literacy changes between 1911 and 1921 in municipalities with higher and lower landownership concentration. We document a substantial overall rise in literacy and show that gains were modestly but systematically larger in municipalities with more concentrated landownership, especially among smaller "comuni". Because pre-1911 municipal literacy data are unavailable and land concentration is observed only in 1929, we interpret these findings as descriptive evidence rather than as a causal estimate of the reform or of land inequality. More broadly, the paper contributes new nationwide municipal evidence on the geography of literacy growth in Liberal Italy and on its association with persistent agrarian structures.