Air pollution was severe in the nineteenth century, yet its health consequences are often overlooked due to a lack of pollution data. We offer a new approach for inferring local coal use levels based on local industrial structure and industry-specific coal use intensity. This allows us to provide the first estimates of the mortality effects of British industrial coal use in 1851-60. Exploiting wind patterns for identification, we find that a one standard deviation increase in coal use raised infant mortality by 6-8% and that industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during this period.

Fifteen male soldiers performed six maximal-effort, 20-km road marchers. They carried load masses of 34, 48, and 61 kg, using a standard military backpack with frame or an experimental doublepack. March times decreased as mass increased and were faster with the standard pack than with the double-pack. The doublepack resulted in less low back discomfort and a lower incidence of blisters at the highest load, but also resulted in more discomfort in the neck and hips. Neither load mass nor pack type affected soldiers' marksmanship ability, grenade throw accuracy, or cognitive ability. The maximal-effort march itself affected the marksmanship tasks by increasing the post-march vertical shot group dispersion. The concept of distributing the load mass more evenly around the center of mass of the body has both positive and negative aspects and warrants further investigation.

The leading theory of directed technical change, developed by Acemoglu (2002), offers two main predictions. First, when inputs are sufficiently substitutable, a change in relative input supplies will generate technical change that augments inputs which become relatively more abundant. Second, if this effect is sufficiently strong, the relative price of the relatively more abundant inputs will increase -the strong induced-bias hypothesis. This paper provides the first empirical test of these predictions using the shock to the British cotton textile industry caused by the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). Using detailed new patent data, I show that the shock increased innovation in Britain directed towards taking advantage of Indian cotton, which had became relatively more abundant. The relative price of Indian cotton first declined and then rebounded, consistent with strong induced-bias. Given my elasticity of substitution estimates, these findings are consistent with the predictions of the theory.

While the Industrial Revolution brought economic growth, there is a long debate in economics over the costs of the pollution externalities that accompanied early industrialization. To help settle this debate, this paper introduces a new theoretically-grounded strategy for estimating the impact of industrial pollution on local economic development and applies this approach to data from British cities for 1851-1911. I show that local industrial coal use substantially reduced longrun city employment growth over this period. Moreover, a counterfactual analysis suggests that plausible improvements in coal use efficiency would have led to substantially higher urbanization rates in Britain by 1911.

The industrial cities of the 19th century were incredibly unhealthy places to live. How much progress has been made in reducing these negative health effects over the past 150 years? To help answer this question, we compare mortality patterns in 19th century England to those in Chinese urban areas in 2000. We document that substantial improvements have been made in improving health in cities over this period. Unlike historical English cities, large cities in China have lower mortality than less populated areas. However, we also provide evidence that in China a substantial relationship between industrial pollution and mortality remains.