We measure technological progress in oceanic shipping by using a large database of daily log entries from ships of the British and Dutch navies and East India Companies to estimate daily sailing speed in different wind conditions from 1750 to 1850. Against the consensus, dating back to North...

Stylised evidence on trade, total factor productivity (TFP) and skill intensity of the labour force is presented. Features emerging as salient are: Growing trade in technology-intensive products from the industrialised nations to the relatively laggard nations leads to embodied technology...

This is the first study that attempts to assess the regional economic impacts of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) investments in a spatially explicit macroeconomic model, which allows us to take into account all key direct, indirect and spatial spillover effects of EIT...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...