Inequality in Landownership, the Emergence of Human-Capital Promoting Institutions, and the Great Divergence

By Oded Galor, Omer Moav, Dietrich Vollrath. The Review of Economic Studies, 2009

770 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of landownership adversely affected the emergence of human-capital promoting institutions (e.g. public schooling), and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries. The prediction of the theory regarding the adverse effect of the concentration of landownership on education expenditure is established empirically based on evidence from the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/437042a84cac7f5a02bb3687cc9a2344b45236be

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The Past, Present, and Future of Economic Growth (2014, background): “A comparative advantage based on natural resources reduces returns to human capital and delays its accumulation (Galor et al. 2008).”
Nation-building Through Compulsory Schooling during the Age of Mass Migration (2019, background): “…motives identi…ed in our core result.24 24This is in line with the evidence presented in Galor and Moav (2006) from England, on how members of Galor et al. (2009) make precise how the industrialisation process interacts with land inequality in determining the level of state provision of…”
Land Reform and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Micro Data (2019, positive): “As a result our analysis is separate, but complementary to the literature that studies the effect of inequality in land ownership on long-run economic growth, through its effect on the institutions and policies adopted (Sokoloff and Engerman, 2000; Adamopoulos, 2008; Galor et al., 2009).”
The role of human capital and innovation in economic development: evidence from post-Malthusian Prussia (2017, neutral): “28 Considered as a whole, the findings of Table 3 suggest that the practical knowledge of master craftsmen which played such a prominent role during the First Industrial Revolution was still useful for independent innovations in more “traditional” technological fields such as machine-building, but…”
Inequality, Human Capital Formation and the Process of Development (2011, positive): “Thus, while industrialists have had a direct economic incentive to support education policies that would foster human capital formation (Galor and Moav, 2006), landowners, whose interests lay in the reduction of the mobility of their labor force, have favored policies that deprived the masses of edu”
Historical Origins of Schooling: The Role of Democracy and Political Decentralization (2010, neutral): “Next, I include a measure of land inequality (a Gini index of land inequality) to take into account the theoretical insights suggested by Galor et al. (2009).24 Results again are similar.”
A story of large landowners and math skills: Inequality and human capital formation in long-run development, 1820–2000 (2014, result): “evidence that this result does not necessarily hold for early societies in which richer individuals had more surviving children (Galor and Moav (2002) proposed a theory of”
Size and dynastic decline: The principal-agent problem in late imperial China, 1700–1850 (2014, background): “A strand of the literature emphasizes the importance of geography in shaping institutions, which in turn influence economic outcomes (Acemoglu et al., 2001, 2002; Easterly and Levine, 2003; Olsson and Hibbs, 2004; Rodrik et al., 2004; Galor et al., 2009).”