Clans, Guilds, and Markets: Apprenticeship Institutions and Growth in the Pre-Industrial Economy

By David de la Croix, Matthias Doepke, Joel Mokyr. Social Science Research Network, 2016

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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).

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e59357582c29de48e558135d01753948074d153

Citations in the corpus

• Families in Macroeconomics (2016, unknown): “The specific role of preference transmission in the context of the British Industrial Revolution is analyzed by Doepke and Zilibotti (2008). bb de la Croix and Doepke (2004, 2009) analyze the importance of this mechanism in the context of education policies.”