Firm Dynamics and Productivity Growth During the Industrial Revolution

虽然众所周知，生产率增长对于长期维持人均收入增长至关重要，但对于不同因素如何促进生产率增长，人们却没有达成共识。人们普遍认为创新是关键，工业革命带来了蒸汽机、珍妮纺纱机等一系列新技术。鉴于此，之前的研究广泛关注这些新发明在18世纪末和19世纪初西欧部分地区持续经济增长中所起的作用。然而，以往研究的一个主要限制是数据的可得程度，将研究限制在国家一级，或至多限制在国家内的总工业部门一级。然而，同时期的研究表明，企业动态是总生产率增长的关键因素。特别是，如果资源分配给生产率最高的公司，也就是说，如果生产率高的公司比生产率低的公司增长得快，那么全国范围内的生产率往往会增长。迄今为止，由于缺乏企业层面的数据，对工业革命期间企业动态演变的理解以及这对生产率增长的影响一直受到抑制。该项目旨在通过建立一个新的法国公司数据集来填补这一重要空白。该数据集将追踪工业革命期间多个不同行业的公司。这个数据集将允许研究人员——以及未来的研究人员——以前所未有的细节来研究从停滞到持续增长的转变。该项目通过收集1788年至1847年期间法国企业的全面覆盖的原始数据集，为理解工业革命期间企业动态的演变迈出了重要的一步。该数据集将在几个方面是独一无二的：(1)它将涵盖广泛行业的公司，包括高创新和低创新部门；(2)在行业内，数据将涵盖生产链不同阶段的公司——例如，在棉花行业，将提供纺纱、织布和染色公司的数据；(3)由于企业名称和位置可用，可以创建面板状结构，允许使用企业固定效应和研究进出；(4)区域数据（和企业区位）已知的事实也可以用来研究集聚效应。本项目数据收集的有用性不仅限于研究工业化期间的生产率增长。研究贸易一体化的影响、资源分配不当的作用以及社会和体制变革与经济发展之间的关系也将是有价值的。

While it is well understood that productivity growth is crucial for sustaining increasing income per capita over time, there is less consensus about how different factors contribute to it. Innovation is widely considered to play a key role, and the Industrial Revolution boasts a host of new technologies such as the steam engine and the spinning jenny. In light of this, previous research has focused extensively on the role that these new inventions played in the onset of sustained economic growth in parts of Western Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century. Nevertheless, a key limitation of previous studies was the level of data availability, restricting research to the level of countries or, at best, aggregate industrial sectors within countries. However, contemporaneous research has shown that firm dynamics are a key element of aggregate productivity growth. In particular, country-wide productivity tends to grow if resources are allocated to the most productive firms, i.e., if productive firms grow more quickly than less productive ones. To date, understanding how firm dynamics evolved during the Industrial Revolution and what effect this had on productivity growth has been inhibited by the lack of firm level data. This project aims at filling this important gap by building a novel dataset of French firms. The dataset will follow firms across time, in a number of different industries during the Industrial Revolution. This dataset will allow the investigators -- and future researchers -- to examine the transition from stagnation to ongoing growth in unprecedented detail. This project takes an important step towards understanding how firm dynamics evolved during the Industrial Revolution by assembling an original dataset with comprehensive coverage of French firms for the period 1788-1847. The dataset will be unique in several dimensions: (1) it will cover firms in a wide set of industries, including highly innovative and less innovative sectors; (2) within industries, the data will cover firms along different stages of the production chain -- for example, in the cotton industry, data on spinning, weaving, and dyeing firms will be available; (3) since firm name and location are available, a panel-like structure can be created, allowing for the use of firm fixed effects and the study of entry and exit; (4) the fact that regional data (and firm location) are known can also be used to investigate agglomeration effects. The usefulness of the data collection in this project is not confined to studying productivity growth during industrialization. It will also be valuable to study the effects of trade integration, the role of misallocation of resources, as well as the relationship between social and institutional change and economic development.