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Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
Abstract
Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence—mostly from British textile industries—however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia uses a unique school enrollment and factory employment database linking 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Using pre-industrial education as instrument for later education and controlling extensively for pre-industrial development, we find that basic education is significantly associated with nontextile industrialization in both phases of the Industrial Revolution. Panel data models with county fixed effects confirm the results. (JEL I20, J24, N13, N33, N63)
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Citations
Cited by
Human capital and industrialization: Evidence from the age of enlightenment
Squicciarini, M. P., & Voigtländer, N. (2015) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjv025 · Cited by 384
The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation: Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands
Cantoni, D. (2015) · Journal of the European Economic Association · doi:10.1111/jeea.12117 · Cited by 311
Immigration and the Diffusion of Technology: The Huguenot Diaspora in Prussia
Hornung, E. (2014) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.104.1.84 · Cited by 280
Self-citationPrecocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution
Kelly, M., Mokyr, J., & Gráda, C. Ó. (2014) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-041042 · Cited by 121
Human Capital Persistence and Development
Rocha, R., Ferraz, C., & Soares, R. R. (2017) · American Economic Journal: Applied Economics · doi:10.1257/app.20150532 · Cited by 86
Metadata
- Authors
- Becker, S. O., Hornung, E., & Woessmann, L.
- Venue
- American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2011-07-01
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 92-126
- ISSN
- 1945-7707 (ISSN-L)
- 1945-7715
- OpenAlex
- W1656128481
- Cited by
- 212
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 34.62
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
