The distinction between macro- and microinventions is at the core of recent debates on the Industrial Revolution. Yet, the empirical testing of this notion has remained elusive. We address this issue by introducing a new quality indicator for all patents granted in England in the period...

We examine the potentialities of a new indicator measuring the value of English patents in the period 1617-1841. The indicator is based on the relative visibility of each individual patent in the contemporary technical and legal literature as summarized in Bennet Woodcroft's Reference Index of...

In this chapter we discuss the role of natural resources and endowment structures on structural change. Departing from theories of trade that stress specialization according to one's comparative advantages as the key route to development, we articulate an alternative point of view on the role of...

This paper presents a History Friendly Model which addresses the issue of the bifurcation in technological styles" between US and Britain during the nineteenth century. The model aims at gaining a better understanding of the micro-dynamics that gave rise to different patterns of innovation in...

Along the development path, countries experience large transformations in their economic structure as productive resources move towards different economic activities. ''Modern economic growth'' is also associated with a self-sustained process of technical change which leads to the emergence of...

A swelling stream of literature employs age-heaping as an indicator of human capital, more specifically of numeracy. We re-examine this connection in light of evidence drawn from nineteenth century Italy: census data, death records, and direct, qualitative evidence on age-awareness and numeracy....

In this work we shall attempt an excursus across fundamentally different streams of modern interpretations of the "primitive entities" constituting the social fabrics of economic systems. Behind each specific interpretative story, there is a set of ceteris paribus assumptions and also some...

The diffusion of innovations is supposed to dissipate inventors' rents. Yet in many documented cases, inventors freely shared knowledge with their competitors. Using a model and case studies, this paper explores why sharing did not eliminate inventors' incentives. Each new technology coexisted...

We study the determinants of the spatial distribution of patent inventors at the county level for Great Britain between 1700-1850. Our empirical analysis rests on the localization model by Bottazzi et al. (2007) and on the related estimation procedure by Bottazzi and Gragnolati (2015). Such an...

The ambiguity of the empirical results on the relationship between copyright and creativity calls for a better theoretical understanding of the issue, possibly enlarging the analysis to other factors such as technology and copyright enforcement. This paper addresses these complex policy issues...