Family and business during the industrial revolution

Credit Rationing and Crowding out during the Industrial Revolution: Evidence

Why was growth so slow during the British Industrial Revolution? More than a decade ago, Jeff Williamson proposed "crowding-out" as a result of Britain's numerous wars as a key mechanism, but little empirical evidence existed to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided. The eighteenthand early nineteenth-century private loan market balanced through qu...

Why England? Demand, Growth and Inequality During the Industrial Revolution

Why was England first? And why Europe? We present a probabilistic model that builds on big-push models by Murphy, Shleifer and Vishny (1989), combined with hierarchical preferences. The interaction of exogenous demographic factors (in particular the English low-pressure variant of the European marriage pattern) and redistributive institutions – such as the “old Poor Law” – combined to make an I...

Knowledge, Technology, and Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution

and an anonymous referee for helpful comments and to Steve Nafziger for research assistance. 1 " It is clear from the preceding that every " art " [technique] has its speculative and its practical side. Its speculation is the theoretical knowledge of the principles of the technique; its practice is but the habitual and instinctive application of these principles. It is difficult if not impossib...

The New Industrial Revolution

The New Industrial Revolution

This article outlines a new framework for understanding the current period of global restructuring, focusing on the relationship between technological change and organizational change. After reviewing the major approaches in the debate over future pathways to industrialization, a new perspective for understanding the ‘new industrial revolution’ is presented. At the core of this revolution is th...