Research Summary

Nuffield Crest Nuffield College
University of Oxford
Oxford Crest

I am currently starting a major new project on market integration during the English Industrial Revolution. Along with Edmund Cannon at the University of Bristol, I have received funding to compile a very large data set on the grain trade. For the period 1770-1864, we are collecting weekly data on grain prices and quantities traded in 150 market towns across England. Using tests for price co-integration and other techniques, we will be able to chart the improvement in market integration over time and relate it to specific innovations (canals, railways, telegraph, etc.) We are also developing econometric techniques for estimating the local interest rate from the appreciation of grain stocks through the year. If we can generate sufficiently precise estimates, then we hope to look at the pattern of regional interest rates and how it changed in the face of financial market innovations (such as the advent of country banks in the late eighteenth century). This line of enquiry is particularly interesting in the light of the recent work on economic growth which stresses the role of financial market integration in generating growth.

I am also in the process of preparing my doctoral research for publication. I have eight papers which consider the issue of technological change in agriculture and its impact on output and productivity. The English Industrial Revolution is special because it was the first industrial revolution. So it is important to establish exactly how new technology was created in England, how it was diffused, how effective it was, and what was the overall effect on output and productivity. The agricultural sector is particularly important in this context. First, agriculture was the largest sector until 1840. Second, following the macroeconomic work of Crafts in The British Industrial Revolution, it is thought that structural change in the economy was driven by high labour productivity in agriculture. Third, there were many new agricultural technologies coming on stream in the eighteenth century, but to date there has been little quantitative work to establish the importance of each innovation.

In the near future I intend to extend my work on labour productivity by modelling the labour market and migration in more detail. In pursuit of that goal I am in the process of compiling a data set of regional wage rates. I have also started preliminary work on estimating the nutritional status of labourers. This is an important issue because it has been argued that the caloric intake of English workers was very low and hence there could be an efficiency wage effect at work.

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