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

Sascha O. Becker (), Erik Hornung () and Ludger Woessmann ()

No CESifo Working Paper No. 2816, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich

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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 N13 N33 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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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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