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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 462-488 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| Journal | Economic Journal |
| Volume | 130 |
| Issue number | 626 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 1 2020 |
Funding
I thank David Atkin, Dan Bogart, Leah Boustan, Karen Clay, Dora Costa, Neil Cummins, Pablo Fajgelbaum, Roger Foquet, Tim Guinnane, Matt Kahn, Ed Kung, Miren Lafourcade, Naomi Lamoreaux, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Petra Moser, Alexander Rothenberg, Werner Troesken and seminar participants at Arizona, Arizona State, Boston University, Bristol, Carnegie-Mellon, LSE, NYU Stern, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, USC, Warwick, Wharton, The World Bank and Yale for their helpful comments. Reed Douglas, Qiyi Song and Vitaly Titov provided excellent research assistance. I thank the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance and Urban Economics, the California Center for Population Research and the National Science Foundation (CAREER Grant No. 1552692) for generous funding.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics
