State Capacity and American Technology: Evidence from the Nineteenth Century

By Daron Acemoglu, Jacob Moscona, James A. Robinson. 2016

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth compellingly shows how technical innovation, stimulated by the country's institutions, has radically improved the living standards of the citizens of the US. We conduct an empirical investigation of the impact of the capacity of the US state, as proxied by the presence of post offices, on innovation. We show that there is a strong association between the number of post offices in a county and patenting activity. Our evidence suggests that part of story of US innovation is the capacity and reach of the US state.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca6b9c9e6a56728fc2de717e575281d75b38bc68

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In Demography

1. N. Johnson
2. Mark Koyama

In Economics and Econometrics

1. N. Johnson
2. Mark Koyama

Citations in the corpus

• States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints☆ (2017, background): “Acemoglu et al. (2016) use the number of postal stations as a proxy for the ‘infrastructural power’ of the state.”