We ask (1) why the United States adopted the car more quickly than other countries before 1929, and (2) why in the United States the car changed from a luxury to a mass market good between 1909 and 1919. We argue that the answer is in part the success of the Model T in the United States and its...

This paper examines the impact of mass production on economic development in the United States and Sweden between the 1930s and early 1970s. It suggests that the historical experience in both countries can be used to illustrate a possible pathway for promoting progressive development of the...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Developing countries are currently making huge investments in electrification, with a view to achieving structural change. What does history say about its impact on the structure of employment? We...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. What was its impact on the structure of employment? We use U.S. Census data from 1910 to 1940 and measure electrification with the length of higher-voltage electricity lines. Instrumenting for...

In several articles published in the 1990s, de Long and Summers argued that investment in producer durables had a high propensity to generate externalities in using industries, resulting in a systematic and substantial divergence between its social and private return. They maintained, moreover,...

Manufacturing was responsible for almost all - 83 percent - of the growth of total factor productivity in the U.S. private nonfarm economy between 1919 and 1929. During the Depression manufacturing TFP growth was not as uniformly distributed, and only half as rapid, accounting for only 48...

Multifactor productivity growth in the U.S. economy between 1919 and 1929 was almost entirely attributable to advance within manufacturing. Distributing steam power mechanically over shafts and belts required multistory buildings for economical operation. The widespread diffusion of electric...

For more than a decade now [i.e., ca. 1983], historians of technology in the United States have been engaged in a collective historiographic endeavor to generate a "conceptual framework" or set of "organizing themes" that would finally give some coherence to the history of technology as an...