Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment *
研究区分了平均人力资本（识字率）与高端知识，利用18世纪法国城市对《百科全书》的订阅密度作为知识精英的代理指标，发现订阅密度能显著预测法国工业化开始后的城市增长，而识字率则不能。
Abstract While human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today, its importance for the Industrial Revolution has typically been assessed as minor. To resolve this puzzling contrast, we differentiate average human capital (literacy) from upper-tail knowledge. As a proxy for the historical presence of knowledge elites, we use city-level subscriptions to the famous Encyclopédie in mid-18th century France. We show that subscriber density is a strong predictor of city growth after the onset of French industrialization. Alternative measures of development such as soldier height, disposable income, and industrial activity confirm this pattern. Initial literacy levels, on the other hand, are associated with development in the cross-section, but they do not predict growth. Finally, by joining data on British patents with a large French firm survey from the 1840s, we shed light on the mechanism: upper-tail knowledge raised productivity in innovative industrial technology.