Abstract
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.
Item Type: | Paper |
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Faculties: | Economics Economics > Chairs > CESifo-Professorship for Empirical Innovation Economics |
Subjects: | 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics |
Language: | English |
Item ID: | 20262 |
Date Deposited: | 15. Apr 2014, 08:57 |
Last Modified: | 29. Apr 2016, 09:17 |