Two productivity puzzles in British economic history

This thesis explores two productivity puzzles of British economic history, puzzles that form the basis for much current policy discussion in industrialized and developing countries. The first is the choice of English peasants to farm open rather than consolidated fields; most scholars agree that the latter were more productive. The second is the prolonged period of time required for the technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution to impact productivity growth.; The first chapter tests the robustness of Deirdre McCloskey's theory that open field agriculture resulted from behavior towards risk. Employing a larger data set than McCloskey I develop better estimates of her key parameters. I use these new parameter estimates to test the robustness of her theory. I find it is not as robust as she suggests. I also find that her hypothesis does not hold when peasants are less than infinitely risk averse; even extremely risk averse peasants would consolidate their fields.; Chapter Two examines how medieval peasants survived chronically bad seed yields. Three explanations dominate: peasants scattered their land to reduce the harvest's variance; peasants stored grain; informal networks were developed to facilitate income sharing. Many researchers have addressed the viability and cost of these alternatives but none has ascertained their relative efficacy. I employ a simulation to rank scattering, saving, and pooling in terms of their effects on mortality. I find that pooling was the most effective insurance mechanism available to medieval peasants; pooling and storage almost always dominate scattering; and even small amounts of savings were more effective than scattering.; The third chapter deals with new measures of productivity and per-capita output that suggest there was no dramatic acceleration of growth in the early Industrial Revolution. Most economic historians confirm that the period was a highly innovative one. This is the productivity paradox of the Industrial Revolution---slow observed growth in a period of rapid innovation. Many explanations have been advanced to explain the paradox; I find them all lacking. My explanation is that the Industrial Revolution is best understood as a paradigm shift---a fundamental alteration in the structure of an economy caused by new technologies. Paul David has identified the combination of rapid innovation and slow productivity growth in his study of electricity's introduction. Many authors have modeled this dynamic, I adopt one developed by Grossman and Helpman.; The model focuses on the slow diffusion of radical innovations along with the development of necessary small-scale innovations needed to make such a technology productive. I link the historical literature on the development of key Industrial Revolution technologies to the parameters of the theoretical literature. I find that the predictions of the theoretical literature are borne out in the historical literature. This eliminates the productivity paradox of the Industrial Revolution. It also suggests some broad parallels between the growth experiences of late 18th century Britain and late 20th century America.