Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Alan Fernihough
Author-Workplace-Name: Institute for International Integration Studies, Trinity College, Ireland
Author-Email:alan.fernihough@gmail.com.
Author-Name: Kevin Hjorstshøj O’Rourke
Author-Workplace-Name: All Souls College, Oxford, UK
Author-Email: kevin.orourke@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
Title: Coal and the European Industrial Revolution
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 exhibits 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.
Classification-JEL: N13, N53, O13, O14, J10 
Keywords: Coal, Historical Population, Geography
Length: 46 pages
Creation-Date: 2014-01-22
Number: _124
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/13183/Coal%20-%20O'Rourke%20124.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_124