Lives versus livelihoods in the middle ages: The impact of the plague on markets over 400 years

Jakob Madsen, Peter Robertson and Longfeng Ye

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: To what extent did outbreaks of bubonic plague disrupt daily economic activity? We estimate the impact of epidemics on regional markets over four centuries – from the Black Death in the 14th century, until the medieval form of the plague became extinct in the 17th century. Despite the extreme mortality risk of bubonic plague, we find that outbreaks only had a modest impact on trade costs and market integration, as measured by local variations in wheat prices. The results provide quantitative evidence on how the lives versus livelihoods tradeoff was managed through history and the extent to which people learned to live with plague. They suggest that economic activity in low income societies is very resilient to epidemics.

Keywords: Epidemics; Trade Costs; Social Distancing; Black Death; Public Health; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I18 N13 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hea and nep-his
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... n_robertson_ye00.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:camaaa:2022-09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cama Admin ().