Journal
ECONOMIC JOURNAL
Volume 130, Issue 626, Pages 462-488Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/ej/uez055
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Funding
- Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance and Urban Economics
- California Center for Population Research
- National Science Foundation (CAREER Grant) [1552692]
- Divn Of Social and Economic Sciences
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [1552692] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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This article provides the first rigorous estimates of how industrial air pollution from coal burning affects long-run city growth. I introduce a new theoretically grounded strategy for estimating this relationship and apply it to data from highly polluted British cities from 1851 to 1911. I show that local industrial coal use substantially reduced long-run city employment and population growth. Moreover, a counterfactual analysis suggests that plausible improvements in coal-use efficiency would have led to a higher urbanisation rate in Britain by 1911. These findings contribute to our understanding of the effects of air pollution and the environmental costs of industrialisation.
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