EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

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

Sascha Becker, Erik Hornung, Ludger Woessmann and Sascha O. Becker
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Sascha O. Becker

No 2816, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

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
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp2816.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution (2009) Downloads
Working Paper: Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revoluti on (2009) Downloads
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:ces:ceswps:_2816

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2816