Landed Elites and Education Provision in England: Evidence from School Boards, 1870-99∗
Landed Elites and Education Provision in England: Evidence from School Boards, 1870-99∗ Marc Go~niy April 27, 2018 Abstract This paper studies the relationship between landownership concentration and state-sponsored education in late-nineteenth century England. Using newly compiled data on a wide range of education measures for 40 counties and 1,387 local School Boards, I show a negative association between land inequality and human capital. To establish causality, I exploit variation in soil texture and the redistribution of land after the Norman conquest. I doing so, I document a strong persistence in inequality over eight centuries. Next, I show that the estimated effects are stronger where landlords had political power and weaker for education demand, suggesting that landownership affects state education through the political process. Keywords: Education, land concentration, taxation, elites, persistence. JEL classification: I25, O43, Q15, N33. 1 Introduction Inequality can be harmful for economic growth (Galor and Zeira 1993). One rea- son is that growth-promoting institutions such as state education may be difficult to implement where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small elite (Galor and ∗I thank Ran Abramitzky, Sasha Becker, Francesco Cinnirella, Gregory Clark, Oded Galor, Daniel Garcia, Albrecht Glitz, Alfonso Herranz-Loncan, Eeva Mauring, David Mitch, Omer Moav, Joel Mokyr, Giacomo Ponzetto, Juha Tolvanen, Felipe Valencia, Hans-Joachim Voth, and semi- nar participants at the All-UC Economic History meeting (Chapman), SAEe (Mallorca), Warwick, FRESH (Barcelona), Louvain-la-Neuve, University of Vienna, and GREQAM. yDepartment of Economics, University of Vienna Moav 2006). America's reversal of fortune often serves as an example: countries in South America had an unequal distribution of land, underinvested in state education, and despite being rich in the past, by the nineteenth century fell behind the United States (Engerman and Sokoloff 2000).
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