Capital-Skill Complementarity and the Emergence of Labor Emancipation

Quamrul Ashraf, Francesco Cinnirella, Oded Galor, Boris Gershman and Erik Hornung

No 2017-03, Department of Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics, Williams College

Abstract: This paper advances a novel hypothesis regarding the historical roots of labor emancipation. It argues that the decline of coercive labor institutions in the industrial phase of development has been an inevitable by-product of the intensification of capital-skill complementarity in the production process. In light of the growing significance of skilled labor for fostering the return to physical capital, elites in society were induced to relinquish their historically profitable coercion of labor in favor of employing free skilled workers, thereby incentivizing the masses to engage in broad-based human capital acquisition, without fear of losing their skill premium to expropriation. In line with the proposed hypothesis, exploiting a plausibly exogenous source of variation in proto-industrialization across regions of nineteenth-century Prussia, the initial abundance of elite-owned physical capital that also came to be associated with skill-intensive industrialization is shown to have contributed to the subsequent intensity of de facto serf emancipation.

Keywords: Labor coercion; serfdom; emancipation; industrialization; physical capital accumulation; capital-skill complementarity; demand for human capital; nineteenth-century Prussia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J47 N13 N33 O14 O15 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 93 pages
Date: 2017-03, Revised 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-gro and nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Capital-Skill Complementarity and the Emergence of Labor Emancipation (2018)
Working Paper: Capital-Skill Complementarity and the Emergence of Labor Emancipation (2017)
Working Paper: Capital-Skill Complementarity and the Emergence of Labor Emancipation (2017)
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