2016/01/01 by David de la Croix, Matthias Doepke, Joel Mokyr · 1 citation
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Apprenticeship #Business #Clan #Economics #Economy #Geography #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Industrial organization #Labour economics #Market economy #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy #Political science
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/qje/qjx026
openalex publication_date 2016/01/01 · crossref created 2017/07/06 · crossref issued 2017/07/10 · crossref published 2017/07/10 · crossref published-online 2017/07/10 · crossref published-print 2018/02/01 · crossref deposited 2023/08/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge help explain the European advantage. We build a model of technological progress in a preindustrial economy that emphasizes the person-to-person transmission of tacit knowledge. The young learn as apprentices from the old. Institutions such as the family, the clan, the guild, and the market organize who learns from whom. We argue that medieval European institutions such as guilds, and specific features such as journeymanship, can explain the rise of Europe relative to regions that relied on the transmission of knowledge within closed kinship systems (extended families or clans).