Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Preindustrial Economy

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)

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Document type	Article de périodique (Journal article) – Article de recherche
Access type	Accès restreint
Publication date	2018
Language	Anglais
Journal information	"The Quarterly Journal of Economics" - Vol. 133, no. 1, p. 1-70 (2018)
Peer reviewed	yes
Publisher	Oxford University Press (Oxford)
issn	0033-5533
e-issn	1531-4650
Publication status	Publié
Affiliation	UCL - SSH/LIDAM/IRES - Institut de recherches économiques et sociales
Keywords	E02 Institutions and the Macroeconomy ; J24 Human Capital • Skills • Occupational Choice • Labor Productivity ; N10 General ; International ; or Comparative ; N30 General ; O33 Technological Change: Choices and Consequences • Diffusion Processes ; O43 Institutions and Growth
Links	https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx026[DOI] http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/192871[Handle]

See also
	[boreal:172953]	Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy