We examine the geography of cotton textiles in Britain in 1838 to test claims about why the industry came to be so heavily concentrated in Lancashire. Our analysis considers both first and second nature aspects of geography including the availability of water power, humidity, coal prices, market...

This study empirically establishes a link between medieval trade, agglomeration and contemporary regional development in ten European countries. It documents a statistically and economically significant positive relationship between prominent involvement in medieval trade and commercial...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

This paper calculates indicators of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and revealed symmetric comparative advantage (RSCA) for 17 British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. The resulting indicators show that the late-Victorian 'workshop of the world' was at a marked...

Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the...

We study the determinants of the spatial distribution of patent inventors at the county level for Great Britain between 1700-1850. Our empirical analysis rests on the localization model by Bottazzi et al. (2007) and on the related estimation procedure by Bottazzi and Gragnolati (2015). Such an...

Why do we choose one language over another? Rival views see language frontiers as exogenous, driven by policy, or endogenous, determined by social, cultural and economic forces. We study language loss in nineteenth-century Ireland's bilingual society using individual-level data from the 1901...

Changes in trade institutions, such as the abolishment of tariff barriers, have a potentially strong impact on economic development. The Zollverein, the 1834 customs union between German states, erased borders in much of central Europe. This paper investigates the Zollverein's economic impact...

This paper examines Gibrat's law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat's law broadly holds even in the face of population doubling every fifty years, an industrial and transport trevolution, and...