Jeremiah Dittmer: The Impact of the Printing Press

JD:

Information technology and economic change: The impact of the printing press: Using data on 200 European cities between 1450 and 1600... economic growth was higher by as much as 60 percentage points in cities that adopted the technology.

That's 60% over 150 years--0.4%/year:

Printing, lately invented in Mainz, is the art of arts, the science of sciences. Thanks to its rapid diffusion the world is endowed with a treasure house of wisdom and knowledge, till now hidden from view. An infinite number of works which very few students could have consulted in Paris, or Athens or in the libraries of other great university towns, are now translated into all languages and scattered abroad among all the nations of the world. --Werner Rolewinck (1474)

JD:

The movable type printing press was the great revolution in Renaissance information technology.... Contemporaries saw the technology ushering in dramatic changes in the way knowledge was stored and exchanged (Rolewinck 1474). But what was the economic impact of this revolution in information technology?... [E]conomists have struggled to find any evidence of this information technology revolution in measures of aggregate productivity or per capita income.... I examine the revolution in Renaissance information technology from a new perspective by assembling city-level data on the diffusion of the printing press in 15th-century Europe.... [C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses....

Did printers simply pick locations that were already bound for growth? This question can be addressed by exploiting supply-side constraints that limited the diffusion of the technology over the infant industry period.... The key innovation in printing – the precise combination of metal alloys and the process used to cast the metal type – were trade secrets. The underlying knowledge remained quasi-proprietary for almost a century.... Over the period 1450-1500, the master printers who established presses in cities across Europe were overwhelmingly German. Most had either been apprentices of Gutenberg and his partners in Mainz or had learned from former apprentices.... [C]ities relatively close to Mainz were more likely to receive the technology.... The geographic pattern of diffusion thus arguably allows us to... [use] distance from Mainz as an instrument for adoption.... The importance of distance from Mainz is supported by an exercise using “placebo” distances. When I employ distance from Venice, Amsterdam, London, or Wittenberg instead of distance from Mainz as the instrument, the estimated print effect is statistically insignificant.

Cities that adopted print media benefitted from positive spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change broadly defined. These spillovers exerted an upward pressure on the returns to labour, made cities culturally dynamic, and attracted migrants.... Print media played a key role in the development of skills that were valuable to merchants.... [P]rint media was also associated with the diffusion of cutting-edge business practice (such as book-keeping), literacy, and the social ascent of new professionals – merchants, lawyers, officials, doctors, and teachers...