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...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

Existing evidence, mostly from British textile industries, rejects the importance of formal education for the Industrial Revolution. We provide new evidence from Prussia, a technological follower, where early-19th-century institutional reforms created the conditions to adopt the exogenously...

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,...

This paper investigates Becker, Hornung and Woessmann's recent claim that education had an important causal effect on Prussian industrialization and finds it unwarranted. The econometric analysis on which this claim is based suffers from severe problems, notably the omission of relevant...