技术采纳与生产率增长：来自法国工业化的证据

中文摘要

新技术往往被缓慢采纳，且——即使在被采纳之后——也需要时间才能反映为更高的加总生产率。对这些模式的一个突出解释是需要重组生产，这通常与重大技术突破相伴而行。我们研究了一个独特的设定，使我们能够检验这一解释的实证相关性：法国第一次工业革命期间机械化棉纺技术的采纳。新技术要求通过将工人从家中迁移至新成立的工厂来重组生产。利用来自法国档案来源的全新手工收集的工厂层面数据集，我们表明，机械化棉纺的生产率增长是由下尾工厂的消失所驱动的——这与在引入新技术时无需重组的其他部门形成对比。我们提供了证据表明，这是由组织挑战（例如开发最优的工厂布局）所驱动的。“试错”过程导致了初期较低且广泛分布的生产率，且——在随后的几十年中——随着知识在经济中扩散以及新进入者采纳了改进的生产组织方法，导致了高生产率增长。

Abstract

New technologies tend to be adopted slowly and – even after being adopted – take time to be reflected in higher aggregate productivity. One prominent explanation for these patterns is the need to reorganize production, which often goes hand-in-hand with major technological breakthroughs. We study a unique setting that allows us to examine the empirical relevance of this explanation: the adoption of mechanized cotton spinning during the First Industrial Revolution in France. The new technology required reorganizing production by moving workers from their homes to the newly-formed factories. Using a novel hand-collected plant-level dataset from French archival sources, we show that productivity growth in mechanized cotton spinning was driven by the disappearance of plants in the lower tail – in contrast to other sectors that did not need to reorganize when new technologies were introduced. We provide evidence that this was driven by organizational challenges such as developing optimal plant layout. A process of ‘trial and error’ led to initially low and widely dispersed productivity, and – in the subsequent decades – to high productivity growth as knowledge diffused through the economy and new entrants adopted improved methods of organizing production.