Time to develop
Endogenous Infrastructure Development and Spatial Takeoff in the First Industrial Revolution
Alex Trew
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper develops a model in which the evolution of the transport sector occurs alongside the growth in trade and output of agricultural and manufacturing firms. Simulation output captures aspects of the historical record of England and Wales over 1710–1881. A number of counterfactuals demonstrate the role that the timing and spatial distribution of infrastructure development plays in determining the timing of takeoff. There can be a role for policy in accelerating takeoff through improving infrastructure, but the spatial distribution of that improvement matters.
A Late Maoist Industrial Revolution? Economic Growth in Jiangsu Province (1966–1978)
Chris Bramall
China Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
According to the conventional wisdom, the promise of the Chinese revolution of 1949 went unfulfilled in the Maoist era. Instead of taking off, the economy grew slowly, and widespread rural poverty persisted. The economic turning point was instead the famous political climacteric of 1976–78. But this metric of aggregates is the wrong criterion by which to judge China's economic record because industrial revolutions have regional beginnings. They invariably take place against a backcloth of slow aggregate growth and stagnant material living standards. Accordingly, we should dwell neither on China's slow overall growth nor its widespread poverty before 1978 but look instead for evidence of an emerging regional growth pole. This article argues that Jiangsu was such a growth pole in the late Maoist era, and that its record bears comparison with that of Lancashire and Yorkshire during the early years of Britain's industrial revolution. This holds out the intriguing possibility that a Chinese economic take-off, diffusing out of the Yangtze Delta, would have occurred even without post-1978 policy changes.
Leaders, Private Interests, and Socially Wasteful Projects: Skyscrapers in Democracies and Autocracies
Haakon Gjerløw & Carl Henrik Knutsen
Political Research Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Political leaders often have private incentives to pursue socially wasteful projects, but not all leaders are able to pursue these interests. We argue that weaker accountability mechanisms allow autocratic leaders to more easily realize wasteful projects than democratic leaders. We focus on one particular project, skyscraper construction, where we obtain objective measures comparable across different contexts. We test different implications from our argument by drawing on a new dataset recording all buildings exceeding 150 m, globally. We find that autocracies systematically build more new skyscrapers than democracies. Furthermore, autocratic skyscrapers are more excessive than democratic ones, and — in contrast with democracies — autocracies pursue skyscraper projects to about the same extent in rural/poor and urban/rich societies. When investigating different mechanisms entailed in our argument, the link between regime type and skyscraper construction seems due in large part to stronger vertical accountability mechanisms and more open information environments in democracies.
How the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Shaped Economic Activity in the American West
Philipp Ager et al.
NBER Working Paper, April 2019
Abstract:
This paper examines the long-run effects of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake on the spatial distribution of economic activity in the American West. Using variation in the potential damage intensity of the earthquake, we show that more severely affected cities experienced lower population increases relative to less affected cities until the late 20th century. This long lasting effect is largely a result of individuals’ high geographical mobility at that time. Less affected areas became more attractive migration destinations in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, which permanently changed the spatial distribution of economic activity in the American West.
Going Postal: State Capacity and Violent Dispute Resolution
Jeffrey Jensen & Adam Ramey
NYU Working Paper, March 2019
Abstract:
Scholars have long tried to understand the conditions under which actors choose to use violent versus non-violent means to settle disputes, and many argue that violence is more likely in weakly-institutionalized settings. Yet, there is little evidence showing that increases in state capacity lowers the use of violent informal institutions to resolve disputes. Utilizing a novel dataset of violence --- specifically, duels --- across American states in the 19th Century, we use the spread of federal post offices as an identification strategy to investigate the importance of state capacity for the incidence of violent dispute resolution. We find that post office density is a strong, consistent, and negative predictor of dueling behavior. Our evidence contributes to a burgeoning literature on the importance of state capacity for development outcomes.
Belgium's historic beer diversity: Should we raise a pint to institutions?
Eline Poelmans & Jason Taylor
Journal of Institutional Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite its relatively small size, Belgium has historically been considered to have the most diverse array of beer varieties in the world. We explore whether Belgium's institutional history has contributed to its beer diversity. The Belgian area has experienced a heterogeneous and variable array of institutional regimes over the last millennia. In many cases institutional borders crossed through the Belgian area. We trace the historical development of many of Belgium's well-known beer varieties to specific institutional causes. We also show that the geographic production of important varieties, such as Old Brown, Red Brown, Trappist, Lambic, Saison, and Gruitbeer, continues to be influenced by Belgium's institutional past.
Intergenerational Occupational Mobility across Three Continents
Santiago Pérez
Journal of Economic History, forthcoming
Abstract:
I compare rates of intergenerational occupational mobility across four countries in the late nineteenth century: 1869–1895 Argentina, 1850–1880 United States, 1851–1881 Britain, and 1865–1900 Norway. Argentina and the United States had similar levels of intergenerational mobility, and these levels were above those of Britain and Norway. These findings suggest that the higher mobility of nineteenth-century United States relative to Britain might not have been a reflection of “American exceptionalism,” but rather a manifestation of more widespread differences between settler economies of the New World and Europe.
You Gotta Fight for Your Right? Publicly Assigned but Privately Enforced Property Rights
Griffin Edwards & Joshua Robinson
International Review of Law and Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Establishment and enforcement of property rights is often seen as a key tenet of a productive society. Many argue that the absence of formal public institutions to establish and enforce property rights necessarily leads to conflict and violent private enforcement of property rights. By re-examining the decision problem of the “early entrants” into the property market, we argue that the mitigation of violent conflict begins when the property is first claimed though the claimants’ anticipation of the likelihood that their ownership will be challenged in the future. We perform a large-scale empirical test of the implications of this model (and of similar papers) by looking at the effect of the Homestead Acts — an exogenous increase in publicly assigned, but privately enforced, property rights — on the occurrence of violence on the American frontier. Exploiting variations in the assignment of homestead grants across states and time, we find that increases in homestead claims cause a statistically significant but economically insignificant increase in homicides. We conclude that there is no evidence that the assignment of privately enforced property rights meaningfully increases violence, and that settlers of the American West, as a whole, behaved in a manner consistent with rational conflict avoidance.
The Millennium Development Goals and Education: Accountability and Substitution in Global Assessment
James Bisbee et al.
International Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Precise international metrics and assessments may induce governments to alter policies in pursuit of more favorable assessments according to these metrics. In this paper, we explore a secondary effect of global performance indicators (GPIs). Insofar as governments have finite resources and make trade-offs in public goods investments, a GPI that precisely targets the provision of a particular public good may cause governments to substitute away from the provision of other, related, public goods. We argue that both the main effect of the GPI (on the measured public good) and this substitution effect vary systematically based on the domestic political institutions and informational environments of targeted states. Specifically, we contend that both the main and substitution effects of GPIs should be largest for governments that are least accountable (opaque and nondemocratic) and should be smallest for those that are most accountable. We illustrate the logic of these arguments using a formal model and test these claims using data on primary and secondary enrollment rates across 114 countries. We find that countries substitute toward primary education enrollment rates (which is targeted by the Millennium Development Goals) and away from secondary (which is not), and that these effects are mitigated as accountability rises.
The Promise and Peril of Peacekeeping Economies
Bernd Beber et al.
International Studies Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
Contemporary United Nations (UN) peacekeeping deployments commonly pursue both security and economic objectives, but the existing scholarly literature contains hardly any systematic assessments of peacekeeping missions’ economic effects. We address this issue in two ways. First, we use cross-country data to show that UN peacekeeping missions are large-scale economic interventions. They stimulate demand in depressed economic environments; we find significantly higher economic growth in the presence of peacekeeping deployments than in comparable cases without them. However, we estimate that economic growth rapidly declines when missions end, which suggests that they do not necessarily promote stable economic development. Second, we provide evidence in this vein by turning to microlevel survey data that we collected in Monrovia, where the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) had a large presence from 2003 onward. Our data suggests that UNMIL's spending created demand for low-skill employment in the service sector, largely without facilitating skill transfers or loosening credit constraints for business owners. This illustrates the problem of “peacekeeping economies” suggested by our cross-country analysis: peacekeeping missions help create an economic boom fueled by demand in nontraded products, particularly low-skill services, which may not be robust to the mission's withdrawal.
Censorship, Family Planning, and the Historical Fertility Transition
Brian Beach & Walker Hanlon
NBER Working Paper, April 2019
Abstract:
The historical fertility transition is one of the most important events in economic history. This study provides new evidence on the role of information and social norms in this transition. We begin by documenting a causal relationship between the public release of information on the morality of engaging in family planning that resulted from the famous Bradlaugh-Besant trial of 1877 and Britain's subsequent fertility decline. We then show that the release of this information had nearly simultaneous effects among British-origin populations abroad, in Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United States. These findings highlight the importance of information and changing social norms in the historical fertility transition, as well as the role that cultural and linguistic ties played in transmitting these changes around the world.
Bride Drain: An Unintended Consequence of China's Urban-Rural Divide
Lei Meng & Min Qiang Zhao
Labour Economics, June 2019, Pages 69-80
Abstract:
This paper studies the impact of rural-urban migration on rural marriage market outcomes within China's institutional and cultural context. Using self-collected and commonly used survey data, as well as Population Census, we find that community-level rural female migration produces a bride drain effect in the rural marriage market: it exerts a negative impact on the marriage likelihood of rural men in addition to the traditional channel of sex ratio imbalance. We find no evidence for an equivalent groom drain effect: the increase in men's migration rate at community level has no negative effect on the marriage likelihood of rural women. Instrumental variable estimation is used to address the endogeneity concern. Our results suggest that China's urban-rural divide has an unintended, long-lasting consequence.