Abstract
Markets where quality is hard to observe allocate opportunities under uncertainty. In such settings, informal mechanisms like trust, reputation, and relational information help agents screen partners when formal verification is limited. These mechanisms are central to innovation and growth, yet they are difficult to observe empirically because uncertainty seldom shifts in a clear and exogenous way. The early modern academic book market of the Low Countries provides an exceptional setting to study these dynamics. It combined dense scholarly communities with an interconnected print industry, while the secession between Northern and Southern provinces produced a sharp divergence in censorship intensity that was exogenous to the book trade and emerged across a stable geographic frontier. This generated quasi-exogenous variation in ideological uncertainty while commercial and technological fundamentals remained comparable. I construct a new dataset linking book trade records to academic affiliations, enabling reconstruction of the multilayer network connecting authors to colleagues and to printers. I develop a mean–variance framework in which printers evaluate authors under noisy signals, with relational proximity increasing signal precision and the value of precision rising when ideological risk intensifies. Finally, I identify the informational role of networks through time-to-event models of first publication and a spatial regression discontinuity design at the 1585 frontier.
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