The objective of this project is to deepen our understanding of the role of technology in economic growth by determining how the adoption of the movable type printing press impacted city growth in Europe. The movable type printing press was the great innovation in early modern information technology and provides the closest historical parallel to the emergence of the internet. This project will construct and analyze a database on the diffusion of the printing press and print media. This work will document how the information technology revolution of the Renaissance transformed the economic geography of Europe and contributed to the emergence of modern growth. The research will combine economic, geographic, and historic scholarship in new ways - to document local interactions between technology, ideas, and institutions that radically transformed economic life.
The central aims of this project are:
1. To produce and disseminate a new database on the diffusion of the printing press and the composition of print media output at the city level.
2. To determine the magnitude of the increases in city growth that were caused by early adoption of the printing press, by exploiting historical evidence.
3. To determine how the magnitude of the printing press effect on growth compares to the effect of geographic advantages associated with climate and location and the impact of institutional determinants of city growth, such as relatively secure property rights.
4. To produce new, quantitative data documenting how the printing press fostered the acquisition of mathematical skills and innovations in business practice and to determine how these transformations were associated with city growth.
This work will for the first time show how the great pre-internet revolution in information technology transformed the economic geography of Europe. The research will produce an original database and an assessment of the relative importance of technology, geography, and institutions as determinants of city growth in European history. Economists recognize that economic activity is highly concentrated in cities and that ideas are at the heart of growth. This study will produce data on the local production of knowledge, link city growth to regional development, and enable an assessment of competing theories of growth articulated and debated by economists.
Broader Impact: This work will produce data and results that will help researchers studying economic geography, the history of science, and urban history understand the connections between entrepreneurship, technology, ideas, and the emergence of modern economic growth. The printing press dramatically reduced the cost of transmitting complex information between cities, leading observers to anticipate a future in which the importance of location was greatly diminished. But the technology was also associated with new face-to-face interactions and with localized spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change. The PI expects that determining how these spillovers operated will allow lessons to be drawn from the past for contemporary questions concerning the impact of modern information technology.
