Abstract
This article provides the first rigorous estimates of how industrial air pollution from coal burning affects long-run city growth. I introduce a new theoretically grounded strategy for ...estimating this relationship and apply it to data from highly polluted British cities from 1851 to 1911. I show that local industrial coal use substantially reduced long-run city employment and population growth. Moreover, a counterfactual analysis suggests that plausible improvements in coal-use efficiency would have led to a higher urbanisation rate in Britain by 1911. These findings contribute to our understanding of the effects of air pollution and the environmental costs of industrialisation.
This study provides causal evidence that a shock to the relative supply of inputs to production can (1) affect the direction of technological progress and (2) lead to a rebound in the relative price ...of the input that became relatively more abundant (the strong induced-bias hypothesis). I exploit the impact of the U.S. Civil War on the British cotton textile industry, which reduced supplies of cotton from the Southern United States, forcing British producers to shift to lower-quality Indian cotton. Using detailed new data, I show that this shift induced the development of new technologies that augmented Indian cotton. As these new technologies became available, I show that the relative price of Indian/U.S. cotton rebounded to its pre-war level, despite the increased relative supply of Indian cotton. This is the first paper to establish both of these patterns empirically, lending support to the two key predictions of leading directed technical change theories.
Air pollution was severe in the nineteenth century, yet its health consequences are often overlooked due to a lack of pollution data. We offer a new approach for inferring local coal use levels based ...on local industrial structure and industry-specific coal use intensity. This allows us to provide the first estimates of the mortality effects of British industrial coal use in 1851-60. Exploiting wind patterns for identification, we find that a one standard deviation increase in coal use raised infant mortality by 6-8% and that industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during this period.
Can a temporary economic shock to an important local industry influence long-run city population? To answer this question I study the large temporary shock to British cities caused by the U.S. Civil ...War (1861–1865), which reduced cotton supplies to Britain’s important cotton textile industry. I show that this event temporarily reduced the growth rate of cities specializing in cotton textile production, relative to other English cities, and led to a persistent change in the level of city population.
Abstract
Can temporary input cost advantages have a long-run impact on production patterns? I study this question in the context of shipbuilding from 1850 to 1911. Although North America was the ...dominant wood shipbuilding region in the mid-19th century, the introduction of metal shipbuilding shifted the industry to Britain, where metal inputs were less expensive. After 1890, Britain’s input price advantages largely disappeared but its dominant position in the industry persisted. I show that American shipbuilders exposed to British competition struggled to transition to metal shipbuilding and present evidence that the mechanism behind Britain’s persistent lead was the development of pools of skilled workers.
Abstract
The historical transition to a low fertility regime was central for long-run growth, but what caused it? Existing economic explanations largely focus on the economic incentives to limit ...fertility. This article presents new evidence highlighting the importance of cultural forces as a complementary driver of the fertility transition. We leverage a sharp change in fertility in Britain in 1877 and document large synchronized declines in fertility among culturally British households residing outside of Britain, in Canada, the US, and South Africa, relative to their non-British neighbours. We propose a plausible catalyst for the change: the famous Bradlaugh–Besant trial of 1877.
History and urban economics Hanlon, W.Walker; Heblich, Stephan
Regional science and urban economics,
05/2022, Volume:
94
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article reviews recent literature using insights from history to answer central questions in urban economics. This area of research has seen rapid growth in the past decade, thanks to new ...technologies that have made available increasingly rich data stretching far back in time. The focus is to review innovative methods to exploit historical information and discuss applications of these data that provide new insights into (i) the long run growth of cities or regional economies and (ii) the spatial organization of economic activities within cities. The review also surveys the growing literature outside urban economics that uses the historical urbanization as a proxy for economic growth, discusses differences between how economic historians and urban economists think about the relationship between urbanization and growth, and considers how these views might be reconciled.
•The drastic increase in the quality and richness of available data over the past decade or so is an important force behind the large and rapidly growing set of historical urban papers and we do not expect this trend to stop.•Rich historical data are brought into closer contact with economic theory.•Historical settings have played a key role in our understanding of some core urban questions, such as the nature of agglomeration economies and congestion forces and the long-run impact of urban infrastructure investments.•Urban economics has been largely successful in integrating the insights and techniques of economic history into their work.
This paper studies the sources of agglomeration economies in cities. We begin by incorporating within and cross-industry spillovers into a dynamic spatial equilibrium model in order to obtain a panel ...data estimating equation. This gives us a framework for measuring a rich set of agglomeration forces while controlling for a variety of potentially confounding effects. We apply this estimation strategy to detailed new data describing the industry composition of 31 English cities from 1851 to 1911. Our results show that industries grew more rapidly in cities where they had more local suppliers or other occupationally-similar industries. We find no evidence of dynamic within-industry effects, i.e., industries generally did not grow more rapidly in cities in which they were already large. Once we control for these agglomeration forces, we find evidence of strong dynamic congestion forces related to city size. We also show how to construct estimates of the combined strength of the many agglomeration forces in our model. These results suggest a lower bound estimate of the strength of agglomeration forces equivalent to a city-size divergence rate of 1.6–2.3% per decade.
Digitized historical newspaper databases offer a valuable research tool. A rapidly expanding set of studies use these databases to address a wide range of topics. We review this literature and ...provide a toolkit for researchers interested in working with historical newspaper data. We provide a brief description of the evolution of historical newspapers, focusing on aspects that are likely to have implications for the design of empirical studies. We then review the main databases in use. We also discuss some key challenges in using these data, most importantly the fact that even the most extensive datasets contain only a selected sample of the universe of historical newspaper articles. We offer tools for evaluating the comprehensiveness of available newspaper datasets, show how to assess potential identification concerns, and suggest some solutions.
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