Coal Smoke and the Costs of the Industrial Revolution

W Hanlon

No 22921, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: While the Industrial Revolution brought economic growth, there is a long debate in economics over the costs of the pollution externalities that accompanied early industrialization. To help settle this debate, this paper introduces a new theoretically-grounded strategy for estimating the impact of industrial pollution on local economic development and applies this approach to data from British cities for 1851-1911. I show that local industrial coal use substantially reduced long-run city employment growth over this period. Moreover, a counterfactual analysis suggests that plausible improvements in coal use efficiency would have led to substantially higher urbanization rates in Britain by 1911.

JEL-codes: N13 N53 Q52 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-pke and nep-ure
Note: DAE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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