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A favoured argument in defence of tariffs, quotas and other trade barriers is to shield emerging (or ‘infant’) industries from foreign competition during a period of establishment and early growth. By temporarily raising the cost of imports, governments can give an industry breathing space to build up a critical mass of capacity and talent, which […]
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Alongside literacy, numeracy is a key pillar of education and progress. Basic arithmetic skills are in essence a requirement for modern-day life, while more sophisticated techniques are fundamental to any number of scientific and technological advances we nowadays take for granted. In a new working paper, Danna, Iori and Mina consider the contribution of mathematics […]
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Today, secondary schooling is a natural pathway for generations of young people. It was not always so. Historically, education was an elite pursuit. And even as public education systems with compulsory primary schooling began to take root (for much of the developed world, in the nineteenth century), high school remained the domain of a relative […]
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That people sometimes err when recalling their age is not uncommon. (I have even been guilty of it myself!) The problem is more acute in historical settings, and even in developing countries today: individuals with limited access to education are less able to calculate their age. An observed tendency is for innumerate people to round […]
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Most creatives acquire professional talents by learning from others, but in most settings it is difficult to estimate the existence of long-term effects. This paper explores the transmission of skills over a period of more than seven centuries by focusing on the case of music composers. We ask the question: how does a composer’s quality influence the quality of the composers he or she teaches? Our analysis builds on a unique dataset of 17,433 composers from around the world since the fourteenth century. By comparing actual teacher–student pairs with plausible counterfactual pairs and by using a two-stage framework, we show a strong effect of quality transmission. Moreover, we find quality transmission persists across multiple generations: from teacher to student, and subsequently to student’s student and so on. Our results provide new insights on drivers of creativity over the very long term, as well as the influence of teachers on students’ achievements.