¹ Landes, David, “French Entrepreneurship and Industrial Growth in the Nineteenth Century,” this JOURNAL, 9 (05 1949), pp. 45–61Google Scholar and The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, 1969);Google Scholar and Kemp, Tom, Economic Forces in French History (London, 1971) take the evidence of French stagnation as a given and seek to explain the development lag.Google ScholarKindleberger, Charles P., Economic Growth in France and Britain, 1851–1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1961) contains a good summary of the relevant literature that “it might be said that France never went through an industrial revolution.”Google Scholar

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⁴ These historians, who focused on entrepreneurial failure as the prime cause of retardation, were collectively labeled “The Harvard School.” Their views were most pungently expressed in Explorations in Entrepreneurial History and included Landes, David, Cole, G. D. H., and Sawyer, John. Sawyer's, John “Strains in the Social Structure of Modern France,” in Earle, E. M., ed. Modern France (Princeton, 1951), pp. 293–312,Google Scholar is a good representative of this approach and “Attitudes, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 6 (May 1954), pp. 273–86, is a good summation of the case for the entrepreneurial view of economic history.Google Scholar

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⁸ Ibid., p. 178.

⁹ Ibid., p. 179.

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¹² Ibid.

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¹⁵ See the discussions in Kindleberger, Economic Growth; Clapham, Economic Development.Google Scholar

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¹⁷ Ibid., p. 171.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 138.

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³⁰ This problem of weighting is the problem of heteroscedasticity in which differing residuals do not share the same variance, σ². Various deflating procedures may be tried to correct for this, but the cure may be worse than the problem. I have chosen not to deal with that issue. I simply note that in the presence of heteroscedasticity the estimated regression parameters remain unbiased but the estimated variances are changed. Since the attention in this article centers on the point estimates rather than statistical “tests of significance,” I have chosen not to second-guess the data. Cf. Maddala, G. S., Econometrics, (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

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³³ Some consideration was given to the problems associated with the potential sensitivity of the results to the choice of functional forms. In particular, the fact that the translog is a generalization of the Cobb-Douglas form makes one uneasy about its ability to track the behavior of constant- elasticity-of-substitution technologies with elasticities greatly different from One. Using the CES-translog form, first proposed by Pollak, Robert, Sickles, Robin, and Wales, Terence, “The CES-Translog: Specification and Estimation of a New Cost Function,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 66 (11 1984), pp. 602–7 led to estimates of measured returns to scale quite similar to those in this article. Thus the conclusions are at least robust to this respecification. The details appear in my dissertation of the same title as this paper, Northwestern University, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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