Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution

Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, vol. 131, issue 4, 1727-1752

Abstract: Although largely absent from modern accounts of the Industrial Revolution, watches were the first mass-produced consumer durable and were Adam Smith’s preeminent example of technological progress. In fact, Smith makes the notable claim that watch prices may have fallen by up to 95% over the preceding century, a claim that this article attempts to evaluate. We look at changes in the reported value of over 3,200 stolen watches from criminal trials in the Old Bailey in London from 1685 to 1810. Before allowing for quality improvements, we find that the real price of watches in nearly all categories falls steadily by 1.3% a year, equivalent to a fall of 75% over a century, showing that sustained innovation in the production of a highly complex artifact had already appeared in one important sector of the British economy by the early eighteenth century.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjw026 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution (2015)
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:oup:qjecon:v:131:y:2016:i:4:p:1727-1752.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().