TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Becker, Sascha O.
AU  - Hornung, Erik
AU  - Woessmann, Ludger
        TI  - Catch Me If You Can: Education and Catch-up in the Industrial Revolution
        PY  - 2009/Nov/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 4556
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp4556
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - Prussian economic history
KW  - industrialization
KW  - human capital
        ER  -