Farmer Families at the Heart of the Educational Revolution: Which Occupational Group Inherited Human Capital in the Early Modern Era?

Franziska Tollnek and Joerg Baten

No 8, CEH Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University

Abstract: In this paper, we assess the inheritance of human capital in the early modern period with a comprehensive dataset covering eight countries in Europe and Latin America. We focus on the within-household process of human capital formation. Gregory Clark suggested that the wealthy and ‘capitalist’ groups of society provided their offspring with favorable skills. We confirm this finding partially, but there is another large group that reproduces successfully: farmers. By applying age-heaping-based techniques to a dataset of more than 322,000 observations, we argue that farmers contributed significantly to the formation of human capital and, consequently, to modern economic growth.

Date: 2012-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hrm
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Working Paper: Farmer Families at the Heart of the Educational Revolution: Which Occupational Group Inherited Human Capital in the Early Modern Era? (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:auu:hpaper:008

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