Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits, and Local Political Control in Sixteenth-Century Castile
利用新的贵族身份案例时间序列数据，量化分析十六世纪卡斯蒂利亚的贵族化现象，发现税收豁免并非主要动机，获取地方政治控制才是核心，且贵族化与西班牙经济停滞无直接关联。
The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the Early Modern period has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” Using a new time series of nobility cases I provide the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement. Contrary to established scholarship, I find that the tax exemptions cannot alone explain the flight to privilege. My data show that the central motivation behind ennoblement was to gain control of local governments. Although ennoblement reflected a high level of redistributive activity, there is no evidence linking it to economic stagnation in Spain.