IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v126y2011i3p1133-1172.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

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

Author

Listed:
  • Jeremiah E. Dittmar

Abstract

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 locations. These findings are supported by regressions that exploit distance from Mainz, Germany--the birthplace of printing--as an instrument for adoption. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeremiah E. Dittmar, 2011. "Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 126(3), pages 1133-1172.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:126:y:2011:i:3:p:1133-1172
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjr035
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:126:y:2011:i:3:p:1133-1172. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.