Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution

Sascha Becker, Erik Hornung and Ludger Woessmann

No 4556, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

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: Prussian economic history; industrialization; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 N13 N33 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published - published as 'Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution' in: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2011, 3 (3), 92-126

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Related works:
Working Paper: Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution (2009)
Working Paper: Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revoluti on (2009)
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