EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Local institutions and pandemics: City autonomy and the Black Death

Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés and Han Wang
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

No 16593, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Local institutions have long been regarded as key drivers of economic development. However, little is known about the role of institutions in preparing places to cope with public health crises and pandemics. This paper sheds light on how the nature of a local institution, city autonomy, influenced variations in the incidence of the Black Death —possibly the worst pandemic ever recorded— across cities in Western Europe between 1347 and 1352. We examine urban autonomy not only because it represented a major political shift in medieval times, but because, more importantly, it also represents a key prototype of modern political institutions. By exploiting data on the spatial variation of Black Death’s mortality rates and duration using OLS and 2SLS methods, we uncover that city autonomy reduced mortality rates by, on average, almost 10 percent. Autonomous cities were in a better position to adopt swift and efficient measures against the pandemic than those governed by remote kings and emperors. This relationship has been confirmed by a series of placebo tests and robustness checks. In contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that city autonomy was a factor in reducing the duration of the pandemic in European cities.

Keywords: Local institutions; Pandemics; City autonomy; Black death; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N43 N93 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16593 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Local institutions and pandemics: City autonomy and the Black Death (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Local institutions and pandemics: city autonomy and the Black Death (2021) Downloads
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:cpr:ceprdp:16593

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16593

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16593