Coal and the European Industrial Revolution

Kevin O'Rourke and Alan Fernihough

No 9819, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We examine the importance of geographical proximity to coal as a factor underpinning comparative European economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Our analysis exploits geographical variation in city and coalfield locations, alongside temporal variation in the availability of coal-powered technologies, to quantify the effect of coal availability on historic city population sizes. Since we suspect that our coal measure could be endogenous, we use a geologically derived measure as an instrumental variable: proximity to rock strata from the Carboniferous era. Consistent with traditional historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution, we find that coal had a strong influence on city population size from 1800 onward. Counterfactual estimates of city population sizes indicate that our estimated coal effect explains at least 60% of the growth in European city populations from 1750 to 1900. This result is robust to a number of alternative modelling assumptions regarding missing historical population data, spatially lagged effects, and the exclusion of the United Kingdom from the estimation sample.

Keywords: Coal; Geography; Historical population; Industrial revolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 N13 N53 O13 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (76)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9819 (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:
Journal Article: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2021)
Working Paper: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2014)
Working Paper: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2014)
Working Paper: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution (2014)
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:9819

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9819

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 ().