Measuring human capital in the united states using copyright title pages, 1790-1870

Tancredi Rapone

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper uses optical character recognition (OCR) to analyze the production of books in the US over 1790 to 1870 using copyright title pages taken from the online archives of the Library of Congress. We construct national time series of book production over this period which show an uptake in per-capita terms in 1830, around the starting point of the US’ industrial revolution. We break down the production of books into topics using keywords for 8 topics: science, religion, novel, invention, diffusion, business, philosophy and textbook. On this basis we show that the composition of book production by topics is stable over time, except for textbooks and novels which show a persistent increase over the whole period both in relative and absolute terms. This pushes back the beginning of the growth in US human capital before the first reliable data on schooling and literacy starting in 1870. We thus offer mild support to an interpretation of US growth over the 19th century based on the expansion of knowledge and capabilities, while conceding that the link between the content of books and industrialization is tenuous.

JEL-codes: J01 N0 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-gro and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:113448

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