Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution /
O'Rourke, Kevin H.
Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution / Kevin H. O'Rourke, Ahmed S. Rahman, Alan M. Taylor. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2007. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w13057 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13057. .
April 2007.
Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth which can endogenously account for both these facts, by allowing the factor bias of technological innovations to reflect the profit-maximising decisions of innovators. Endowments dictated that the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution be unskilled-labor biased. The transition to skill-biased technological change was due to a growth in "Baconian knowledge" and international trade. Simulations show that the model does a good job of tracking reality, at least until the mass education reforms of the late nineteenth century.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution / Kevin H. O'Rourke, Ahmed S. Rahman, Alan M. Taylor. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2007. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w13057 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13057. .
April 2007.
Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but is skill-biased today. This fact is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model of the transition to sustained economic growth which can endogenously account for both these facts, by allowing the factor bias of technological innovations to reflect the profit-maximising decisions of innovators. Endowments dictated that the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution be unskilled-labor biased. The transition to skill-biased technological change was due to a growth in "Baconian knowledge" and international trade. Simulations show that the model does a good job of tracking reality, at least until the mass education reforms of the late nineteenth century.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.