DP9819 Coal and the European Industrial Revolution

Author(s):	Alan Fernihough, Kevin Hjortshøj O'Rourke
Publication Date:	February 2014
Keyword(s):	Coal, Geography, Historical Population, Industrial Revolution
JEL(s):	J10, N13, N53, O13, O14
Programme Areas:	Economic History
Link to this Page:	cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=9819

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.