Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-Up in the Industrial Revolution
56 Pages Posted: 17 Nov 2009
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Catch Me If You Can - Education and Catch-Up in the Industrial Revolution
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.
Keywords: human capital, industrialization, Prussian economic history
JEL Classification: N13, N33, I20, O14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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