'Getting to Denmark': the role of agricultural elites for development.

ABSTRACT: We explore the role of elites for development and the spread of industrialized dairying in Denmark in the 1880s. We demonstrate that the location of early proto-modern dairies, introduced by landowning elites from northern Germany in the eighteenth century, explains the location of industrialized dairying in 1890: an increase of one standard deviation in elite influence increases industrialized dairying by 56 percent of the mean exposure in one specification. We interpret this as evidence for a spread of ideas from the elites to the peasantry, which we capture through measures of specialization in dairying and demand for education and identify a causal relationship using an instrument based on distance to the influential first mover. Finally, we demonstrate that areas with cooperatives enj

SUBMITTER: Boberg-Fazlic N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10069355 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature