Lukas Rosenberger
(LMU, Munich)
will give a presentation on
Why Britain? The Right Place (in the Technology Space) at the Right Time
Abstract: How did Britain sustain faster rates of economic growth than comparable European countries, such as France, during the Industrial Revolution? We argue that Britain possessed an important but underappreciated innovation advantage: British inventors worked in technologies that were more central within the innovation network. We offer a new approach for measuring the innovation network using patent data from Britain and France in the 18th and early 19th century. We show that the network influenced innovation outcomes and then demonstrate that British inventors worked in more central technologies within the innovation network than inventors from France. Drawing on recently-developed theoretical tools, we quantify the implications for technology growth rates in Britain compared to France. Our results indicate that the shape of the innovation network, and the location of British inventors within it, help explain the more rapid technological change and industrial growth in Britain during the Industrial Revolution.
(joint with Walker Hanlon and Carl Hallmann)