Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35969 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 4556
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
Human capital
industrialization
Prussian economic history
JEL: 
N13
N33
I20
O14
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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