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

Sascha Becker, Erik Hornung and Ludger Woessmann

No 2009-19, Stirling Economics Discussion Papers from University of Stirling, Division of Economics

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 nontextile industrialization in both phases of the Industrial Revolution.

Keywords: Human capital; industrialization; Prussian economic history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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http://hdl.handle.net/1893/1613

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 Revolution (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:stl:stledp:2009-19

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