Book Production and the Onset of Modern Economic Growth

Baten, Jörg; Zanden, Jan Luiten van

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1003128

Cited by 42 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In fact, the crucial role of innovation for economic development and growth has been underlined by a large literature in this area (e.g., Solow 1956, Romer 1986Lucas 1988). Nevertheless, the long-run implications of human capital on innovation and economic development need further research because this issue has only been touched upon in few contexts (e.g., Baten and Van Zanden 2008). Therefore, the question remains whether pre-existing human capital is important for the creation of long-run development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe

2018

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Human capital is supposed to be an important factor for innovation and economic development. However, the long-run impact of human capital on current innovation and economic development is still a black box, in particular at the regional level. Therefore, this paper makes the link between the past and the present. Using a large new dataset on regional human capital and other factors in the 19 th and 20 th century, we find that past regional human capital is a key factor explaining current regional disparities in innovation and economic development.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe

2018

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“…While some evidence points to an effect of education rather than institutions (Glaeser et al 2004), others find that the effect of institutions is robust to controlling for education (Ang 2013), in particular when accounting for the endogeneity of human capital (Acemoglu et al 2014a). Overall the literature indicates that both factors are drivers of long term development (Baten and Zanden 2008;Jones and Romer 2010;Easterly and Levine 2016). Due to the high correlation between human capital and institutions the empirical framework of the present paper does not allow to address the question of relative effects directly.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Further Unbundling Institutions

Braunfels¹

2016

SSRN Journal

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This paper analyzes the effects of institutions on economic development, and focuses on separating political institutions from contracting and economic institutions. For a sample of former European colonies, I find that differences in income levels are strongly affected by political institutions, which regulate political accountability and constrain political elites. There is some evidence for a positive effect of economic institutions, which protect property rights, but no evidence for positive effects of contracting institutions, which facilitate contracting among individuals. A decomposition of GDP reveals that political institutions work through the channel of physical and human capital accumulation. Economic institutions have a positive impact on total factor productivity. To identify and unbundle effects, I exploit exogenous variation in each of the three institutions using instrumental variables based on colonial history and geographic endowments. The application of a recently developed test for weak instruments in the multiple endogenous variables setting shows that the effects of institutions can be separated. The paper adds to the literature by identifying the fundamental importance of political institutions for economic development, and provides an inside into the channels through which specific institutions affect income levels.

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“…Baten and van Zanden [2008] argue that book consumption is a good measure of a country's human capital because it is a proxy for adults' capability to comprehend the written word. If this is correct, then the low number of books in Latin American homes indicates that Latin American adults have an unusually low level of human capital, given their level of schooling and their societies' average level of income.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Effect Of Booksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low Test Scores in Latin America: Poor Schools, Poor Families, or Something Else?

Breton

Bacarreza

2016

SSRN Journal

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Latin American students consistently score low on international tests of cognitive skills. In the PISA 2012 results, students in seven Latin I. IntroductionIn a recent analysis of on economic growth in Latin America, Hanushek and Woessmann [2012] argue that growth rates have been low despite increases in average levels of schooling because students' cognitive skills are "truly dismal." They show that student scores on mathematics and science tests are considerably lower in Latin America than in other countries with similar levels of schooling, and they conclude that, "the average student seems to get much less learning, as depicted by the test scores, for each year of schooling than the average student in the rest of the world."It is natural to presume that if students in Latin America are not learning as much as students elsewhere, the teachers or the educational system must be at fault. But student learning is a function of activity both within and outside the school system. So the activity in the educational system may not be the whole cause, or even the most important cause of the low scores.Breton [2015] presents evidence that high average test scores in other parts of the world, especially in East Asia, are due in part to the extensive private tutoring that students receive to raise these scores. In addition, it has been known since Coleman [1966] that a student's test scores are substantially determined by the socioeconomic characteristics of the student's family. Since Latin American countries are characterized by an unusually high level of income inequality, with a large share of poor families, the low scores could be due to the low average socioeconomic characteristics of these families.Alternatively, the low scores could be a result of Latin American culture, which assigns less importance to student achievement on standardized tests than countries with Confucianbased cultures. The average level of schooling and the average scores on standardized tests are so uniform across Latin America that there may be an underlying cultural basis for these low scores.In this study we attempt to quantify the causes of the low average test scores in Latin America, using cross-country data from the PISA 2012 evaluation of student test scores. In this analysis we estimate the effects of a series of family and school characteristics on test scores in Latin America and compare them to their estimated effects in Scandinavia.There are many existing cross-country analyses of the effect of family and school characteristics on international test scores, which find that both types of characteristics affect student scores. But these analyses invariably assume that family and school characteristics have the same effect in every country (For example, [Woessmann, 2003]).

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Book Production and the Onset of Modern Economic Growth

Cited by 42 publications

References 25 publications

The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe

The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe

Further Unbundling Institutions

Low Test Scores in Latin America: Poor Schools, Poor Families, or Something Else?

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