Flowers of evil? Industrialization and long run development

Is industrialization conducive for economic development in the long-run? Exploiting exogenous variation in the diffusion of steam engines across 19th century France, the research suggests that early industrialization has had an adverse effect on long-run prosperity, stemming from the negative impact of the adoption of unskilled-labor-intensive technologies in early stages of industrialization on contemporary levels of human capital and thus the incentive to adopt skill-intensive technologies. The research suggests that characteristics that enabled the onset of industrialization, rather than industrial technology per se, have been the source of prosperity among developed economies that experienced earlier industrialization.