Kenneth L. Sokoloff

Inventive Activity in Early Industrial America: Evidence from Patent Records, 1790 - 1846

A sample of patent records from the United States between 1790 and 1846 is employed to study the patterns in inventive activity. Patenting was pro-cyclical, and yet began to grow rapidly with the interruptions in foreign trade that preceded the War of 1812. A strong association between patenting and proximity to navigable waterways is also demonstrated. Although the importance of specific mechanisms remains unclear, both the temporal and cross-sectional evidence imply that inventive activity was positively related to the growth of markets during early industrialization.

The early achievement of modern stature in America.

The military records used in this article, referred to as muster rolls or descriptive lists, are predominantly from the years of the French and Indian War (1756-1763) and the American Revolution (1775-1783), and pertain to the soldiers of the American Colonies. Such lists were compiled for most colonial military forces, typically by individual companies or regiments, and provided the basis for distributing supplies and payments, as well as for aiding in the identification of deserters. Since there was no standard format, the information appearing in the muster rolls varies widely. Lists have been retrieved that included for each soldier some, but never all, of the following information: place of birth, age, place of residence, occupation, height, hair color, eye color, complexion, place and date of enlistment, military rank, by whom enlisted, language spoken, term of service, pay scale, and assorted remarks relevant to military service. We have also collected a sample of U.S. Army muster rolls for those recruits who enlisted during the period 1815-1820. These lists are of a similar nature to those of the earlier era, except that they are much more uniform with regard to the information included. Very few individuals under the age of 16 enlisted in the military, making it

The Democratization of Invention During Early Industrialization: Evidence from the United States, 1790–1846

We employ the 1860 Census of Manufactures to study rural antebellum manufacturing in the South and Midwest, and find that manufacturing output per capita was similar across regions in counties specialized in the same agricultural products. The southern deficit in manufactures per capita appears to have been largely attributable to the very low levels of output in counties specialized in cotton production. This implies that it was the Souths capabilities for the highly profitable cotton production, not the existence of slavery per se, that was responsible for the regions limited industrial development -- at least in rural areas. The other major finding is that in both the South and the Midwest measured total factor productivity was significantly lower in counties specialized in wheat (the most seasonal of agricultural products as regards labor requirements). This is consistent with suggestions that agricultural districts where the predominant crops were highly seasonal in their requirements for labor were well suited to support manufacturing enterprise during the offpeak periods.

Patterns of Productivity Growth In South Korean Manufacturing Industries, 1963-1979

Abstract In this paper we estimate sources of labor productivity growth in 25 Korean manufacturing industries between 1963 and 1979. We find that less than half of the 11 percent annual increase in overall manufacturing labor productivity can be attributed to capital deepening, and that the importance of this factor and total factor productivity advance varied sharply across industries. Heavy industries accumulated capital per worker at a faster pace, and realized total factor productivity growth at a much slower rate, than others did. This contrast may be related to the extensive capital subsidies provided to the former as part of an import-substitution program. Also, the rapid total factor productivity growth in labor-intensive manufacturing industries was accompanied by rapid growth in average firm size, supporting the argument that the shift from craft to modern production techniques has been a major source of productivity growth.

Institutions and Democratic Invention in 19th-Century America: Evidence from "Great Inventors," 1790-1930

concern with the impact of patent institutions on the rate and direction of inventive activity, and of technological change more generally. Much of the analysis has focused on what seem to be the most direct effects of granting an exclusive property right in technological knowledge: the enhanced returns that inventors can extract by enjoying a state-mandated monopoly on discoveries they make, and the higher costs that those who might choose to employ the new technologies have to bear as a result of a society recognizing property rights in information. In this paper, however, we highlight another feature whose significance has received little attention. We argue that defining and enforcing a tradable asset in new technological knowledge is also important because it encourages the evolution of a market in technology, and because it extends and increases incentives for investment in inventive activity to segments of the population that would otherwise find it difficult to directly extract returns from their technological creativity. The framers of the U.S. patent institutions

Slavery in the development of the Americas

Part I. Establishing the System: 1. White Atlantic? The choice for African slave labor in the plantation Americas Seymour Drescher 2. The Dutch and the slave Americas Pieter C. Emmer Part II. Patterns of Slave Use: 3. Mercantile strategies, credit networks, and labor supply in the colonial Chesapeake in trans-Atlantic perspective Lorena S. Walsh 4. African slavery in the production of subsistence crops, the case of Sao Paulo in the nineteenth century Fransisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein 5. The transition from slavery to freedom through manumission: a life-cycle approach applied to the United States and Guadeloupe Frank D. Lewis Part III. Productivity Change and Its Implications: 6. Prices of African slaves newly arrived in the Americas, 1673-1865: new evidence on long-run trends and regional differentials David Eltis and David Richardson 7. American slave markets during the 1850s: slave price rises in the US, Cuba, and Brazil in comparative perspective Laird W. Bergad 8. The relative efficiency of free and slave agriculture in the antebellum United States: a stochastic production frontier approach Elizabeth B. Field-Hendrey and Lee A. Craig Part IV. Implications for Distribution and Growth: 9. Slavery and economic growth in Virginia, 1760-1860: a view from probate records James R. Irwin 10. The poor: slaves in early America Philip D. Morgan 11. The North-South wage gap, before and after the Civil War Robert A. Margo The writings of Stanley L. Engerman.

Finance, Intermediaries, and Economic Development

Preface: n nThis volume contains papers first presented at a conference, In Data Veritas: Institutions and Growth in Economic History, held in honor of Lance Davis at the California Institute of Technology, November 6-8, 1998. In addition to the presenters, also attending , as formal or informal discussions, were Karen Clay, Robert Cull, Price Fishback, Albert Fishlow, Stephen Haber, John James, Shawn Kantor, Zorina Khan, Margaret Levenstein, Rebecca Menes, Clayne Pope, and John Wallis. The Introduction and the Afterword were written by the editors at a later date. We wish to thank Frank Smith from Cambridge University Press and the two anonymous referees for the Press for very helpful suggestions. n nWe wish to acknowledge the administrative help of Susan G. Davis and the financial help of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, in the conference arrangements. In preparing the final manuscript we were aided by the Department of Economics, University of Rochester; the Department of Economics, UCLA,; and the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology. In the process of publication, we benefited from the editorial work of Michie Shaw of TechBooks, the copyediting of Carol Sirkus, and the preparation of the index by Kathleen Paperchonits. But most of all we gained form the scholarship and enthusiasm of Lance Davis.

Patent Alchemy: The Market for Technology in US History

The literature on inventors has traditionally focused on entrepreneurs who exploited their ideas in their own businesses and on researchers who worked in large firms R&D laboratories. For most of US history, however, it was as common for inventors to profit from their ideas by selling off or licensing the patent rights. This article traces the different ways in which inventors resolved the information problems involved in marketing their patents. We focus in particular on the patent attorneys who emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century to help inventors find buyers for their intellectual property.

Long-Term Trends in Schooling: The Rise and Decline (?) of Public Education in the United States

In recent decades, there has been rising anxiety about the quality of the public education in the United States. However, it is important to note that this has not always been the case; in fact, the United States has long been a leader in terms of the public provision of education at all levels of schooling. This chapter documents this history, describing the conditions in the early years of the country that were conducive to the rise of universal public education, in particular the relative homogeneity of the population and the local nature of the provision of public education. These factors increased local support and enabled the educational system to be responsive to local needs. In more recent history, however, there has been substantial change in the demographics of the United States; this chapter also explores how well the public education system has been able to adapt to these changes.

Human capital and institutions : a long run view

Human Capital and Institutions is concerned with human capital in its many dimensions and brings to the fore the role of political, social, and economic institutions in human capital formation and economic growth. Written by leading economic historians, including pioneers in historical research on human capital, the chapters in this text offer a broad-based view of human capital in economic development. The issues they address range from nutrition in pre-modern societies to twentieth-century advances in medical care; from the social institutions that provided temporary relief to workers in the middle and lower ranges of the wage scale to the factors that affected the performance of those who reached the pinnacle in business and art; and from political systems that stifled the advance of literacy to those that promoted public and higher education. Just as human capital has been a key to economic growth, so has the emergence of appropriate institutions been a key to the growth of human capital.