What six centuries of Florentine tax records tell us about family wealth

In 1427, Florence’s government carried out a detailed census of the city’s 60,000 residents. The city needed money after years of war with Milan, so officials recorded everyone’s job, income and assets. Six centuries later, economists Guglielmo Barone and Sauro Mocetti used that same record to trace Florentine families all the way to their present-day descendants, publishing their findings in the Review of Economic Studies in 2021.

Across roughly twenty generations, the pattern held. Families near the top of the wealth rankings in 1427 were still more likely than most to be near the top today. Certain professions ran in families for centuries too, well beyond what income and opportunity alone would explain.

The part that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet

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Wealth clearly persisted. So did something harder to name: habits around saving and spending, attitudes to risk, a sense of what a family is “for.” That second inheritance rarely gets discussed with the same care as the first.

Most families we work with think hard about the technical side of passing on wealth: wills, trusts, tax thresholds, the mechanics of who receives what. Far fewer have had an open conversation about the expectations sitting behind those documents. A father dies, and his adult children discover they’d each assumed something different about the business he built. One assumed she’d run it. One assumed it would be sold. Nobody had actually said so out loud.

Two habits worth borrowing

Families who handle this well share two habits. They talk about money across generations before it becomes urgent, rather than waiting for a health scare or a death to force the conversation. And they treat succession as something to revisit as circumstances change, not a single document signed once and filed away.

Part of that conversation is preparing children to actually handle what they’ll inherit, not just deciding what they’ll receive. A young adult who understands how to manage money is in a very different position to one who simply arrives at a windfall.

Planning for both sides of an inheritance

This is why we treat succession as work with two halves: the technical structures that protect a family’s wealth, and the conversations that shape how it gets used. Getting the first right without the second tends to leave a business with no agreed future, or an inheritance that arrives with no shared understanding of what it’s meant to do.

Six hundred years is a long time to plan for. Most of us are only trying to think two or three generations ahead. The Florence data is a reminder that whatever we pass on, financial or otherwise, tends to travel further than we expect.

Source: Barone, G. and Mocetti, S. (2021) “Intergenerational Mobility in the Very Long Run: Florence 1427–2011”, Review of Economic Studies, 88(4), pp. 1863–1891.