Suchergebnisse

This article explores the effects of political structure on rulers' monopolistic gains and investment decisions in the context of the medieval milling industry in northern France, 1150–1250. Using Salop's spatial model, this article aims to show that political fragmentation increased investment in watermill construction because it reduced the capacity of rulers to limit competition from neighbouring mills. The calculations demonstrate that competition significantly reduced rulers' income from watermills and that the construction of more than 50 per cent of these mills cannot be economically 'justified' unless rulers' profit maximization over joint production is considered, and revenues from additional labour allocated to wheat production is included.

This article draws on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell's manual for prospective apprentices, The London tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship premiums in mid‐eighteenth‐century London to market forces of supply and demand. It first shows that Campbell's data on mid‐eighteenth‐century journeymen wages, apprenticeship premiums, and masters' set‐up costs in London are consistent with other sources. It then applies instrumental variable regressions to estimate the elasticity of apprenticeship premiums with respect to journeymen wages and set‐up costs, using Campbell's education and ability requirements by trade to instrument for wages. We find an elasticity of one with respect to wages, and of 0.25 with respect to set‐up costs, both statistically significant at a p‐value less than 0.1%. We interpret these findings as supporting the thesis that apprenticeship played an important role in adapting the English workforce to the skill requirements of the industrial revolution in its early stages, insofar as the institution of apprenticeship in London was representative of other parts of England. Furthermore, by demonstrating the internal and external consistency of Campbell's observations, our findings should encourage their use as an unparalleled source of detailed, trade‐specific wage data from the early years of the industrial revolution.

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of the early adoption of technology on the evolution of human capital and industrialisation. We argue that mechanical skills and competence were a main determinant of the location of industry on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. It concentrates on the case of millwrights, eighteenth-century specialists in advanced carpentry and hydraulic machinery. Millwrights were a key part of the upper tail of the distribution of mechanical abilities. Their emergence was determined by the early adoption of watermills in the Middle Ages as recorded in the Domesday Book survey (1086). Their location displays considerable persistence.

We use annual information on apprenticeships in England between 1710–1805 to estimate the dynamic supply-responsiveness in this market in the presence of the increasingly powerful technological shocks as the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace. Using both an Instrumental Variable method and a dynamic Vector Autoregression framework (VAR) system to identify the long-run response functions, we find evidence of an elastic supply, sufficiently high as to allow quantities to rise considerably in response to demand shocks. This finding lends support to the view that Britain's apprenticeship institution was the source of its advantage in skilled mechanical labor, so critical to its economic success.