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Patent Growth in the Old Dominion: The Impact of Railroad Integration before 1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

William H. Phillips
William H. Phillips
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Economics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.
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Abstract

Endogenous growth theories suggest that market integration will be more conducive to economic development when the previously isolated regions have large stocks of human capital. This paper uses the level of per capita patenting in nineteenth-century Virginia to measure this human capital. By the end of the 1870s, the rail network of the Old Dominion was rapidly being integrated with the rest of the nation. Inventiveness spread throughout northern Virginia, but the former plantation areas of the state fell behind.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fifty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 389 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1992

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