Arbeitspapier

Catch me iIf you can : education and catch-up in the industrial revolution

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously emerging new technologies. Our unique school-enrollment and factory-employment database links 334 counties from pre-industrial 1816 to two industrial phases in 1849 and 1882. Controlling extensively for pre-industrial development, we use pre-industrial education as an instrument to identify variation in later education that is exogenous to industrialization itself. We find that basic education significantly accelerated non-textile industrialization in both phases of the Industrial Revolution.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 2816

Classification
Wirtschaft
Economic History: Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations: Europe: Pre-1913
Economic History: Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy: Europe: Pre-1913
Education and Research Institutions: General
Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
Subject
human capital
industrialization
Prussian economic history
Bildungspolitik
Allgemeinbildung
Bildungsinvestition
Industrialisierung
Entwicklungskonvergenz
Wirtschaftsgeschichte
Preußen

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Becker, Sascha O.
Hornung, Erik
Woessmann, Ludger
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)
(where)
Munich
(when)
2009

Handle
Last update
20.09.2024, 8:24 AM CEST

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Becker, Sascha O.
  • Hornung, Erik
  • Woessmann, Ludger
  • Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo)

Time of origin

  • 2009

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