Investment in Fixed and Working Capital During Early Industrialization: Evidence From U.S. Manufacturing Firms
利用1832年美国制造业企业调查数据，研究了早期工业化时期固定资本与流动资本投资的相对规模及其随企业规模、地点和行业的变化，发现多数行业人均机械工具投资较低，挑战了早期工业化基于机械密集型技术的观点。
This paper utilizes a survey of U. S. manufacturing firms from 1832 to investigate the structure of manufacturing investment during early industrialization. The relative magnitudes of investments in fixed and working capital, and how they varied with firm size, location, and industry, are documented. This variation across industries in the composition of capital investments is indicative of a more general variation in factor intensities, and bears on the issues of why industries became concentrated in the regions they did, and the degrees to which they were adversely affected by the limited availability of long–term loans. Evidence that most manufacturing industries had quite modest investments in machinery and tools per unit of labor is also presented, serving to undercut the notion that the early period of industrialization was based on a proliferation of new, machinery–intensive technologies.