Abstract
In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge help explain the European advantage. We build a model of technological progress in a preindustrial economy that emphasizes the person-to-person transmission of tacit knowledge. The young learn as apprentices from the old. Institutions such as the family, the clan, the guild, and the market organize who learns from whom. We argue that medieval European institutions such as guilds, and specific features such as journeymanship, can explain the rise of Europe relative to regions that relied on the transmission of knowledge within closed kinship systems (extended families or clans).
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1-70 |
| Number of pages | 70 |
| Journal | Quarterly Journal of Economics |
| Volume | 133 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1 2018 |
Funding
∗We thank Robert Barro and Larry Katz (the editors), four anonymous referees, Francisca Antman, Hal Cole, Alice Fabre, Cecilia García-Peñalosa, Murat Iyigun, Pete Klenow, Georgi Kocharkov, Lars Lønstrup, Guido Lorenzoni, Kiminori Matsuyama, Ben Moll, Ezra Oberfield, Michèle Tertilt, Chris Tonetti, Joachim Voth, Simone Wegge, and participants at many conference and seminar presentations for comments that helped substantially improve the article. Financial support from the National Science Foundation (grant SES-0820409) and from the French-speaking community of Belgium (grant ARC 15/19-063) is gratefully acknowledged.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
