Abstract
We examine the health effects of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, a sharp downturn in Britain's cotton textile manufacturing regions that was induced by the US Civil War. Migration was an important response to this downturn, but as we document, migration also introduces a number of empirical challenges, which we overcome by introducing a new methodological approach. Our results indicate that the recession increased mortality among households employed in the cotton textile industry. We also document localized spillover effects on households providing nontradable services in the areas affected by the recession.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 228-255 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| Journal | American Economic Journal: Applied Economics |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2022 |
Funding
*Arthi: University of California Irvine and NBER (email: [email protected]); Beach: Vanderbilt University and NBER (email: [email protected]); Hanlon: Northwestern University and NBER (email: whanlon@ northwestern.edu). Ilyana Kuziemko was coeditor for this article. We thank James Feigenbaum, James Fenske, Joe Ferrie, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Tim Hatton, Taylor Jaworski, Amir Jina, Shawn Kantor, Carl Kitchens, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Doug Miller, Grant Miller, Christopher Ruhm, William Strange; audiences at the 2017 ASSA Annual Meeting, 2017 NBER Cohort Studies Meeting, 2017 PAA Annual Meeting, 2017 SDU Workshop on Applied Microeconomics, 2018 All-California Labor Economics Conference, and 2018 NBER DAE Spring Meeting; and seminar participants at Columbia University, Cornell University, University of Essex, Florida State University, University of Michigan, Princeton University, Queen’s University, Queen’s University Belfast, RAND, University of Toronto, University of California Davis, and University of Warwick for helpful comments. For funding, we thank the UCLA Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance and Urban Economics, the California Center for Population Research, the UCLA Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant Fund, and the National Science Foundation (CAREER Grant No. 1552692). We are grateful to the UK Data Archive and Campop for providing data used in this project. This study builds on a previous NBER Working Paper (No. 23507), “Estimating the Recession-Mortality Relationship when Migration Matters.” †Go to https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20190131 to visit the article page for additional materials and author disclosure statement(s) or to comment in the online discussion forum.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Economics, Econometrics and Finance
