Det kommer allt fler studier som undersöker hur olika ekonomiska beteenden har historiska rötter. En ny sådan, ”Historical Legacies in Savings: Evidence from Romania”, undersöker om det finns historiska faktorer som påverkar sparandet hos rumäner. Studien sammanfattas så här:

Imperial history has an important and lasting influence on savings behaviors today. In my sample, the most conservative estimates suggest that Habsburg farmers are 18 percentage points more likely to have accumulated savings in excess of 1000 Lei – the equivalent of a month’s salary – and have saved roughly 320 Lei ($75 USD) more than non-Habsburg farmers. The Habsburg effect is proportional to a 45 percent increase over average non-Habsburg savings, making the imperial effects less than trivial.

I carefully explore several channels through which this relationship persists and find no evidence that transmission operates through risk and time preferences or cultural transmission in savings accumulation. Rather, the results suggest that an important mechanism is financial access. Disparities in financial development across the Habsburg border within Romania were documented as early as 1911 (Mendelski and Libman, 2014), and the evidence I present here suggests that these disparities persist today. … Additional evidence suggests that historical differences in financial access encourages people with lower financial access to substitute savings into informal assets such as animals, grain inventory, or jewelry, which have a lower rate of return than formal savings accounts. Households living in non-Habsburg regions are 25 percent more likely to save in an informal asset and saving in informal assets is associated with 27 percent lower accumulated savings.

Fascinerande forskning och resultat. Man bör inte underskatta betydelsen av finansiell infrastruktur. Det finns ibland en tendens att se finansiella marknader som på det hela taget skadliga. Visst finns det risker och problem med sådana marknader, men man får inte heller glömma de fördelar de ger för att ge grund för finansiering av produktiv verksamhet. Ytterligare en sak att ta med sig är att effekterna av vilka finansiella system som finns på plats kan bli mycket långvariga. Det talar för försiktighet när det gäller att underminera relativt välfungerande sådana.

Se även de tidigare inläggen ”Nyttan av finansiella innovationer”, ”Har handel och kapitalmarknader gett långsiktig tillväxt?” och ”Kommunismens finansiella ekonomi”.