%0 Report
        %A Becker, Sascha O.
%A Hornung, Erik
%A Woessmann, Ludger
        %T Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
        %D 2009
        %8 2009 Nov
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 4556
        %U https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp4556
        %X 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.
        %K Prussian economic history
%K industrialization
%K human capital