Link to paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueae115… NotebookLM podcast-summary of the paper, informative take on the paper: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/63637ff2-0afe-4574-ba93-2acad6eed752/audio?pli=1

What were these knowledge sharing societies? What was happening in the eighteenth century? The eighteenth century witnessed an increase in the production of ideas, both scientific and technical. Yet, for many potential entrepreneurs, accessing the stock of knowledge was difficult. This is where economic societies come in. They were founded to overcome the challenge of accessing and organizing knowledge. They strictly focused on useful knowledge, i.e. not on the high science of the earlier academies, but on practical technical innovations that could help the local economy.

The members of economic societies were not university employed knowledge elites, but common merchants, bureaucrats, teachers, or landowners. They met in the societies’ headquarters to discuss practical, useful knowledge, that was directly relevant to improving the local economy. The societies further published their own journal where they collected articles from their members on technical innovations and empirical observations and they announced their own prize competitions.

So, did these societies have an actual impact on long-run innovation? In this paper, there’s collected and geocoded 3302 members of 15 economic societies in the German lands.

the local presence of society members is a strong predictor for patents and exhibits in the 19th century. various measures to mitigate endogeneity, incl. an IV strategy, testing for pre-trends of notable people and assigning placebo society seats.

increasing the local number of members in economic societies by 100% led to a ca. 25% increase in local patenting in 1877-1914 and local exhibits at the Vienna World Fair in 1873. This is a striking relationship over ca. 100 years. What was the mechanism?

Country of Saxony and its economic society relying on contemporary population census and manufacturing data from the 18thcentury.

In a difference-in-differences setting, we show that the foundation of the economic society there was associated with higher manufacturing foundations, especially in textiles. the involvement of economic societies in the foundation of vocational schools. We show that through vocational schooling, economic societies further contributed to higher innovation by raising the local stock of human capital. Additionally, we argue that economic societies created persistent networks of innovations. For this, we apply a gravity-type-model to estimate whether common membership in economic societies was associated with patenting in similar classes in the 19thcentury.

Economic Societies lowered the costs of accessing information on useful knowledge and created persistent networks that influenced the direction of innovation 100 years after their foundation.

Economic societies from the 18th century were the first type of knowledge sharing societies that focused on useful and practical technical knowledge.