Research increasingly stresses the role of human capital in modern economic development. Existing historical evidence-mostly from British textile industries-however, rejects that formal education was important for the Industrial Revolution. Our new evidence from technological follower Prussia...

We study the e ect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We nd positive short- and long-term e ects of having a station on...

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration,...