Human Capital, Technology Diffusion, and Economic Growth - Evidence from Prussian Census Data

This volume was prepared by Erik Hornung while he was working in the Department Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Department of the University of Munich (LMU). The thesis consists of four core chapters, each studying a different aspect of how human capital and technology diffusion shaped the growth and development of historical Prussia. The structure of the thesis follows a chain of causal effects from human capital, to technological diffusion, to economic growth. The econometric analysis draw on rich micro-level data, exclusively digitized for this thesis from Prussian censuses originally collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The four core chapters show how human capital and technology shaped the economic development of Prussia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During this period, the basic economic environment was formed and long-term consequences of these developments may still be observed in contemporary Germany.