Education and Skills during the First Industrial Revolution in England

We provide evidence that education contributed to England’s Industrial Revolution by increasing upper-tail human capital. Contrary to the prevailing view that schooling was irrelevant to early industrialization, we show that the expansion of schooling lowered barriers to entering apprenticeships in skill-intensive trades. We introduce new parish-level data on 3,000 school foundations, 46,000 charitable bequests, and 350,000 apprenticeship contracts between 1711 and 1805. Using a staggered difference in-differences design exploiting educational endowments through wills, we show that the expansion of schooling increased apprenticeship training, particularly in occupations requiring reading, writing, and mathematical skills that were crucial for the Industrial Revolution.