While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the...

While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the...

The paper answers two questions simultaneously. What is the effect of offshoring on firms' total factor productivity? What is the effect of offshoring on skill-biased technological change? We estimate a model of firm production that allows for the effect of offshoring on both total factor...