The Corliss steam engine and the United States economy in the late nineteenth-century.

摘要

Based on Nathan Rosenberg and Manuel Trajtenberg's study, my research focuses on the effects that the Corliss engines had on the growth of the US economy in the late nineteenth century. I study how some economic variables, including the population, affected the utilization of Corliss steam engines. I use both the number of buyers of the Corliss engines and the horsepower generated to measure the utilization of Corliss steam engines. The overall steam engines are also considered as the dependent variable to compare with the Corliss engine. I also study how the Corliss steam engines, as well as other factors, influenced population growth. The OLS, Poisson and Negative Binomial models are used. Because of the recombination of counties over time, both the processed data set and the reduced data set are utilized in the models. My results show both consistency and inconsistency with Rosenberg and Trajtenberg (2004).