Engineering Growth

This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory: the engineer. We construct a database on the share of engineers in the labor force during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914) at the county level for the US, and the state and national levels for the Americas. These measures are robustly correlated with income today after controlling for literacy, other types of higher order human capital (college graduates, lawyers, physicians, patenting) and demand side factors, as well as after instrumenting engineering using the 1862 US Land Grant Colleges program. Differences in engineering density in 1880 account for 10% higher US county incomes today, while national disparities in engineering density can explain approximately a quarter of the income divergence in the Americas. To document the mechanisms through which engineering density works, we show how it is correlated with higher rates of technology adoption and structural transformation across intermediate time periods, and with numerous measures of the knowledge economy today.