Neither the elite, nor the mass. The rise of intermediate human capital during the French industrialization process
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Neither the elite, nor the mass. The rise of intermediate human capital during the French industrialization process Claude Diebolt1 · Charlotte Le Chapelain2 · Audrey Rose Menard3 Received: 14 February 2019 / Accepted: 11 November 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract This paper investigates the development of intermediate human capital in nineteenth-century France. We perform panel and cross-sectional regression analyses to compare the effect of technological change on basic versus intermediate human capital accumulation. Our contribution reveals that a shift in the kind of skills required occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. We show that steam technology adoption was conducive to the accumulation of intermediate human capital in the second half of the nineteenth century. Keywords Human Capital · Industrialization · Steam engines · Technological change · France JEL Classification A12 · C18 · C80 · I21 · N13 · N33 · N73 · N93 · O14 · O33
1 Introduction The relationship between technological change and human capital is ambiguous. In the contemporary period, a consensus surrounds the idea that technological change is skill-biased and that it favors skilled labor over unskilled labor. Paradoxically, the * Charlotte Le Chapelain charlotte.le‑chapelain@univ‑lyon3.fr Claude Diebolt [email protected] Audrey Rose Menard audrey.menard@univ‑nantes.fr 1
Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée, Université de Strasbourg, 61 Avenue de la Forêt Noire, 67085 Strasbourg Cedex, France
2
Centre Lyonnais des Historiens du Droit et de la Pensée Politique, Bureau d’Economie Théorique et Appliquée, Université de Lyon 3, 6 Cours Albert‑Thomas, 69355 Lyon Cedex 08, France
3
Laboratoire d’Economie et de Management Nord‑Atlantique, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, 44000 Nantes, France
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industrialization process of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries is usually regarded as a deskilling process. The view that has prevailed until very recently is that, during the first stage of industrialization, technological advances increased relative demand for unskilled labor and therefore that technological innovation and skills were not complementary (see, for instance, Nicholas and Nicholas 1992; Mokyr 1993; Mitch 1999). According to Goldin and Katz (1998), the complementarity took place in the early twentieth century with the technological shift from steam power to electricity. The view that the process of industrialization—during the age of steam power— was deskilling has recently prompted renewed attention and gives rise to contrasting results. Feldman and Van der Beek (2016) claim that technological progress was conducive to skills acquisition in eighteenth-century England by showing that the number of apprentices and their share in the cohort of the fifteen-year-olds increased in response to inventions. Franck and Galor’s (2018) analysis also supports the “skillbiased technological change” hypothesis for the French case in the ear
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