Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution /
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...
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- Elektronisch E-Book
- Sprache:
- Englisch
- Veröffentlicht:
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Cambridge, Mass.
National Bureau of Economic Research
2007.
- Zusammenfassung:
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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.
- Umfang:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Anmerkungen:
- April 2007.
- Schlagworte:
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