作者:University of London
摘要:An analysis of innovations in the eighteenth-century British textile industry is the basis for an evaluation of aggregate studies of invention during the industrial Revolution, derived from patent evidence alone. Disaggregation of the data challenges recent generalizations concerning the pace and pattern of technical change over the period. Discontinuities in the nature of invention, promoting an acceleration in total factor productivity growth, are traced to the 1790s. Prior to that date, ind...
作者:SICSIC, P
摘要:Wage gaps between farm and city are used to assess whether industrialization in late nineteenth-century France was choked off by peasants' alleged reluctance to move. If industry suffered due to labor scarcity, wage gaps should have been large and rising. It tums out that the wage gap, when adjusted for costs of living and computed as an average of 20 regional wage gaps, was nil in 1852 and about 25 percent in 1892. Thus wage gaps were rising but were far smaller throughout the late nineteenth...
作者:PHILLIPS, WH
摘要:Endogenous growth theories suggest that market integration will be more conducive to economic development when the previously isolated regions have large stocks of human capital. This paper uses the level of per capita patenting in nineteenth-century Virginia to measure this human capital. By the end of the 1870s, the rail network of the Old Dominion was rapidly being integrated with the rest of the nation. Inventiveness spread throughout northern Virginia, but the former plantation areas of t...