Time for growth

Lars Boerner and Battista Severgnini

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of the early adoption of one of the most important high-technology machines in history, the public mechanical clock, on long-run growth in Europe. We avoid en- dogeneity by considering the relationship between the adoption of clocks with two sets of instru- ments: distance from the first adopters and the appearance of repeated solar eclipses. The latter instrument is motivated by the predecessor technologies of mechanical clocks, astronomic instru- ments that measured the course of heavenly bodies. We find significant growth rates between 1500 and 1700 in the range of 30 percentage points in early adoptor cities and areas.

Keywords: technological adoption; cities; mechanical clocks; information technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N13 N93 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2015-08-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64495/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Time for Growth (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:64495

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