J.M.W. Turner - Rain, Steam and Speed

Hence, our results show that the expansion of education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to the rise of the artisanal ‘upper-tail’, and therefore to the technical changes of the Industrial Revolution.

We suggest that these effects can account for up to 25% in the compositional changes of apprenticeship skills in Britain during the period

In contrast, we don’t find an effect on apprentices that did not require literacy and numeracy

We present both long-run staggered and short-run stacked diff-in-diff results that document that more schooling led to an increase in apprentices requiring literacy and numeracy

Hence, for school foundations through wills, we establish that the location of an endowment was endogenous, but that the timing of an endowment was purely determined by the timing of death of the donor – at least within a certain time frame

We then establish causally identified results in a difference-in-differences approach. For identification, we exploit the nature of the 18th century English educational system. Schools were exclusively founded through private endowments that often came in the form of wills.

These are exactly the ones that would have been needed for implementing the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution

We first document stylized facts at the cross-sectional level. There we find that non-classical schooling was strongly associated with the presence of apprentices that required reading, writing, or arithmetic upon entry

In our paper we make a first attempt at resolving this puzzle. We compile new microdata on school foundations during the eighteenth century and match them to ca. 350,000 apprentices

It seems that all of these facts fit poorly together

Beyond that, human capital, e.g. occupational skills or natural philosophy has featured prominently in accounts of the Industrial Revolution, including the accounts by recent Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr. And usually human capital and schooling go hand in hand.

The puzzle deepens when we look at the educational landscape in Britain before the Industrial Revolution. We find that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by two centuries of a “dramatic” expansion of schooling. Did this really have no effect?

However, classic explanations of the First Industrial Revolution in England have generally concluded that education was irrelevant

Let’s start by spelling out the puzzle:
Education is strongly associated with economic growth over the 20th century and considered as a key factor in the transition to modern economic growth.

Link to working paper: www.lse.ac.uk/asset-librar...

J.M.W. Turner – “Going to School, for Rogers's 'Poems'” and the quantitative landscape of vocational training and education in Britain

New paper alert 🚨 🚨
Education and Skills during the First Industrial Revolution in England
Together with co-authors @sdepleijt.bsky.social and @patrickwallis.bsky.social, we set out to solve one of the most intriguing puzzles of the Industrial Revolution

Did a feedback mechanism between propositional and prescriptive knowledge create modern growth? What was the origin of modern economic growth? Joel Mokyr has argued that self-sustained modern economic growth originated from a feedback loop between propositional (theoretical) and prescriptive (ap...

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.16587

In the end, what matters is how we produce, organize, and share knowledge.

That was true in 1700. It’s still true today.

More broadly, the paper demonstrates how historical text data and modern NLP tools can be combined to study long-run economic change.

This opens up new avenues for research on long-run growth, economic history, and the knowledge economy.

Taken together, the results provide strong quantitative support for Mokyr’s feedback-loop hypothesis. The new quantitative evidence is crucial since Mokyr’s work provide us with one of the most influential accounts of the origin of modern economic growth.

Using a difference-in-differences design across technical subfields, I show that exposure to knowledge from the Lexicon technicum led to higher innovation in affected fields over the following decades.

For causal evidence, I exploit the publication of the Lexicon technicum (1704), the first British scientific encyclopedia, as a shock to access costs to scientific knowledge.

To address this, I run Placebo tests, first with other unrelated fields and then with all other fields - we see that none other fields produce coefficients of the magnitude of propositional and prescriptive knowledge

But what about confounders like language or writing style?

This timing is not incidental.

It lines up exactly with the Industrial Enlightenment and the onset of sustained modern growth. This is evidence in support of Joel Mokyr’s theory.

Before 1700, spillovers between science and technology were neutral or negative.

During the eighteenth century, they flipped - becoming strongly positive by the mid-century.

The results are striking

And then, I apply these measures to the universe of all titles in England between 1600-1800 (they’re more like short abstracts, with an avg. of 55 words)

Now we can finally estimate what we’re interested. Did spillovers from theory to technology – and vice versa - make titles more innovative?

Next, to make sure this method works well, I validate the innovation measure against historical patent citations

Hence, I use a MacBERTh model that was pre-trained on historical text and fine-tune it to 17th+18th century scientific and technological texts specifically