TY  - BOOK
AU  - O'Rourke,Kevin H.
AU  - Rahman,Ahmed S.
AU  - Taylor,Alan M.
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2007///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - April 2007; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - 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
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w13057
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w13057
ER  -