A replication of "Education and catch-up in the Industrial Revolution" (American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2011)

Jeremy Edwards

No 2017-30, Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Although European economic history provides essentially no support for the view that education of the general population has a positive causal effect on economic growth, a recent paper by Becker, Hornung and Woessmann (Education and catch-up in the Industrial Revolution, 2011) claims that such education had a significant impact on Prussian industrialisation. The author shows that the instrumental variable they use to identify the causal effect of education is correlated with variables that influenced industrialisation but were omitted from their regression models. Once this specification error is corrected, the evidence shows that education of the general population had, if anything, a negative causal impact on industrialisation in Prussia.

Keywords: education; industrialization; Prussia; regional effects; invalid instrument (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 N13 N63 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/discussionpapers/2017-30
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/162571/1/890950679.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwedp:201730

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().