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Trade, Knowledge, and the Industrial Revolution / Kevin H. O'Rourke, Ahmed S. Rahman, Alan M. Taylor.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- O'Rourke, Kevin H.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w13057.
- NBER working paper series no. w13057
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2007.
- Summary:
- 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.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- April 2007.
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