Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press

@article{Dittmar2011InformationTA,
  title={Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press},
  author={Jeremiah Dittmar},
  journal={Quarterly Journal of Economics},
  year={2011},
  volume={126},
  pages={1133-1172}
}
  • Jeremiah Dittmar
  • Published 1 August 2011
  • Economics, History
  • Quarterly Journal of Economics
The printing press was the great innovation in early modern information technology, but economists have found no macroeconomic evidence of its impact. This article exploits city-level data. Between 1500 and 1600, European cities where printing presses were established in the 1400s grew 60% faster than otherwise similar cities. Cities that adopted printing in the 1400s had no prior advantage, and the association between adoption and subsequent growth was not due to printers choosing auspicious… 
View via Publisher
conference.nber.org
280 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
24
Background Citations
112
Methods Citations
41
Results Citations
11

280 Citations

New media, competition and growth: European cities after Gutenberg

This research studies how variations in competition and in media content characterized the use and impact of Gutenberg's printing press technology during the European Renaissance. The research…

New media, firms, ideas, and growth: European cities after Gutenberg

Gutenberg's printing press was the great revolution in Renaissance information technology. This paper presents new evidence on media markets, knowledge transmission, and city growth across Europe…

New Media and Competition: Printing and Europe's Transformation after Gutenberg

We study the role of book content in economic, religious, and institutional development after the introduction of printing, and the role of competition in determining the amount and content of local…

Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation

  • Jared Rubin
  • Economics
    Review of Economics and Statistics
  • 2014
Abstract The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper seeks to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of…

The decline of merchant guilds in Europe: Role of trade and information shocks in market development

In this paper, I theorize that trade and information shocks were necessary for developing modern impersonal markets. I develop a dataset on the decline of merchant guilds in Europe and find that…

Printing and Protestants: Reforming the Economics of the Reformation

The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper attempts to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the…

Trade and information shocks, and market development: Evidence from early modern Europe

In the sixteenth century some northwest European cities underwent institutional change. These cities removed privileges that members of certain merchant guilds enjoyed, and began to develop…

The long Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub Saharan Africa

This article delves into the relationship between newspaper readership and civic attitudes, and its effect on economic development. To this end, we investigate the long-term consequences of the…

The Economic Origins of Modern Science: Technology, Institutions, and Markets

I study how the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press shocked the market for ideas and the labor market, increasing the returns to and quantity of science. Professor salaries increased…

Human Capital, Technology Diffusion, and Economic Growth - Evidence from Prussian Census Data

This volume was prepared by Erik Hornung while he was working in the Department Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2012 and accepted as a doctoral thesis…
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 113 REFERENCES

The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century

  • W. Smith
  • Economics, History
    The Journal of Economic History
  • 1984
During Amsterdam's development as the commercial center of Europe in the seventeenth century, an informal “information exchange” appeared among the economic and political institutions of the city.…

Progress and Poverty in Early Modern Europe

An econometric model of economic development is estimated with data from leading European countries between 1300 and 1800. The model explores the impact of population, enclosure, empire,…

Long-Term Economic Growth and the History of Technology

Urbanization, Technological Progress, and Economic History

It has become customary among economic historians to distinguish four different sources of economic growth (see, for example, Mokyr, 1990, for an exposition). Although these sources are…

The Diffusion of Innovations in Early Modern Europe

  • C. Cipolla
  • History
    Comparative Studies in Society and History
  • 1972
In recent years the study of the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ has become a very fashionable subject. Everett M. Rogers stressed the fact that his book on the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ was based on 506…

Ideas and Growth

What is it about modern capitalist economies that allows them, in contrast to all earlier societies, to generate sustained growth in productivity and living standards? It is widely agreed that the…

Cities , Markets , and Growth : The Emergence of Zipf ’ s Law

Zipf’s Law characterizes city populations as obeying a distributional power law and is supposedly one of the most robust regularities in economics. This paper documents, to the contrary, that Zipf’s…

The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815

Preface 1. By way of introduction Part I. Structures: 2. Space and time, structures and conjunctures 3. The people 4. Money and taxes, borrowing and lending 5. Three questions Part II. Sectors: 6.…

Was an Industrial Revolution Inevitable? Economic Growth Over the Very Long Run

This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite…

Book production and the onset of modern economic growth

We provide a new data set on per capita book production as a proxy for advanced literacy skills, and assess this relative to other measures. While literacy proxies very basic skills, book production…
...