Creating Firms for a New Century: Determinants of Firm Creation around 1900

A rapidly growing literature in industrial economics and regional economics uses data sets of individual firms or regional firm creation rates to answer the central question: What makes entrepreneurs? Which factors encourage some people to set up their own business and create jobs, and what prevents potential entrepreneurs from doing so? This contribution explores the determinants of regional differences in firm creation rates by using a new data set of 4036 individual firms from Southwest Germany around 1900. Agglomeration effects and earlier firm creations stimulate current firm creation. In addition, a small and medium firm environment allows the formation of specific human capital – another favourable factor for a dynamic firm creation process in some regions.

Global Trends in Numeracy 1820-1949 and its Implications for Long-Run Growth

This study is the first to explore long-run trends of numeracy for the 1820-1949 period in 165 countries, and its contribution to growth. Estimates of the long-run numeracy development of most countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, America, and Europe are presented, using age-heaping techniques. Assessing the determinants of numeracy, we find school enrolment as well as Chinese instruments of number learning to have been particularly important. We also study the contribution of numeracy as measured by the age-heaping strategy for long-run economic growth. In a variety of specifications, numeracy mattered quite strongly for growth patterns around the globe.human capital, age heaping, growth, industrial revolution, numeracy

The human capital of Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe in European perspective

We trace the development of numeracy in Poland and Russia from the early 17th century onwards, and numeracy in Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania from the 18th century onwards. The fact that western Poland was doing relatively well during the 16th and early 17th centuries, but was not able to converge to Western European levels during the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, and even fell back relative to Southern Europe during this period, might support the hypothesis that the second serfdom development was one of the core factors delaying Eastern European human capital accumulation. The major wars in the region also had a devastating effect on numeracy levels.

Brain Drain in the Age of Mass Migration: Does Relative Inequality Explain Migrant Selectivity?

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human capital selectivity of international migrants. In a sample of 52 source and five destination countries we find selective migration determined by relative anthropometric inequality in source and destination countries. Other inequality measures confirm this. The results remain robust in OLS and Arellano-Bond approaches. We confirm the Roy-Borjas model of migrant self-selection. Moreover, we find that countries like Germany and UK experienced a small positive effect, because the less educated emigrated in larger numbers.international migration, labor markets, human capital, economic history

Growth accounting in items of turbulence and death: efficiency, technology, capital accumulation and human capital 1929-1950

We employ a non-parametrical approach to growth accounting (Data Envelopment Analysis, DEA) to disentangle the proximate sources of labour productivity growth in 41 nations between 1929 and 1950 by decomposing productivity growth into four components: technological change; efficiency catch-up (movements towards the production frontier), capital accumulation and human capital accumulation. We show that efficiency catch-up generally explains productivity growth, whereas technological change and factor accumulation were limited and distorted by the effects of war. War clearly hampered efficiency. Moreover, an unbalanced ratio of human capital to physical capital (a gap to the technological leader) was crucial for efficiency catching-up.DEA, growth accounting, productivity, interwar period

Trends of Children’s Height and Parental Unemployment: A Large-Scale Anthropometric Study on Eastern Germany, 1994 – 2006

The average height of children is an indicator for the quality of nutrition and health care. Heights have never declined over longer time spans in Eastern Germany since 1880 – except for the most recent period 1997-2006. In the Eastern German Land of Brandenburg, a data set of 253,050 pre-school height measurements was compiled and complemented with information on parents’ schooling and employment status. Unemployment might have negative psychological effects, with impact on health care. Both a panel analysis of districts and an assessment at the individual level yield the result that increasing unemployment was in fact the major driving force.height, unemployment, Eastern Germany, welfare measurement

Cross-linguistic activation in bilingual sentence processing: the role of word class meaning

This study investigates how categorial (word class) semantics influences cross-linguistic interactions when reading in L2. Previous homograph studies paid little attention to the possible influence of different word classes in the stimulus material on cross-linguistic activation. The present study examines the word recognition performance of Dutch-English bilinguals who performed a lexical decision task to word targets appearing in a sentence. To determine the influence of word class meaning, the critical words either showed a word class overlap (e. g. the homograph tree [ noun], which means "step" in Dutch) or not (e.g. big [ADJ], which is a noun in Dutch meaning "piglet"). In the condition of word class overlap, a facilitation effect was observed, suggesting that both languages were active. When there was no word class overlap, the facilitation effect disappeared. This result suggests that categorial meaning affects the word recognition process of bilinguals

The development of subordinate clauses in German and Swedish as L2s: a theoretical and methodological comparison

In this article, we aim to contribute to the debate about the use of subordination as a measure of language proficiency. We compare two theories of SLA—specifically, processability theory (PT; Pienemann, 1998) and dynamic systems theory (de Bot, Lowie, & Verspoor, 2007)—and, more particularly, their addressing of the development of subordinate clauses. Although DST uses measures from the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) research tradition (see Housen & Kuiken, 2009), PT uses the emergence criterion to describe language development. We will focus on the development of subordinate clauses and compare how subordination as such is acquired and how the processing procedures related to a specific subordinate clause word order is acquired in the interlanguage (IL) of second language German and Swedish learners. The learners’ language use shows that the use of subordination (as measured by a subordination ratio) fluctuates extensively. From the beginning of data collection, all learners use subordinate clauses, but their use of subordinate clauses does not increase linearly over time, which is expected by DST. When focusing on processability and the emergence of subordinate clause word order, however, a clear linear developmental sequence can be observed, revealing a clear difference between the nonacquisition and the acquisition of the subordinate clause word order rules. Our learner data additionally reveal a different behavior regarding lexical and auxiliary or modal verbs

Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Anthropometric Research and the Development of Social Science History

anthropometric history

On the human capital of Inca Indios before and after the Spanish conquest: Was there a "pre-colonial legacy"?

Not only the colonial period, but also the pre-colonial times might have influenced later development patterns. In this study we assess a potential pre-colonial legacy hypothesis for the case of the Andean region. In order to analyze the hypothesis, we study the human capital of Inca Indios, using age-heaping-based techniques to estimate basic numeracy skills. We find that Peruvian Inca Indios had only around half the numeracy level of the Spanish invaders. The hypothesis holds even after adjusting for a number of potential biases. Moreover, the finding has also crucial implications for the narrative of the military crisis of the Inca Empire. A number of explanations have been given as to why the Old American Empires were not able to defend their territory against the Spanish invaders in the early 16th century. We add an economic hypothesis to the debate and test it with new evidence: Were the human capital formation efforts of the Inca economy perhaps too limited, making it difficult to react appropriately to the Spanish challenge? --human capital,age-heaping,Inca empire,inequality,growth