Abstract
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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2652-2675 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Economic Journal |
| Volume | 128 |
| Issue number | 615 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2018 |
Funding
Fig. 3. Maps of Industrial Coal Use, Population Density and Mortality Notes. Colours correspond to quartiles of each variable, where darker colours indicate higher values. We are grateful to the Cambridge Project on The Occupational Structure of Nineteenth Century Britain (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) for their generosity in providing us with shapefiles for the 1851 Registration Districts. Infant mortality rates are calculated relative to births.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
