“Big Data” in Economic History

Gutmann, Myron P.; Merchant, Emily Klancher; Roberts, Evan

doi:10.1017/s0022050718000177

Cited by 34 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 186 publications

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“…Using text and especially newspapers as data is a recent development. Yet, already an entire literature using text as data exists (Algaba et al, 2020;Baker et al, 2016;Currie et al, 2020;Gentzkow et al, 2011Gentzkow et al, , 2014Gentzkow et al, , 2015Gutmann et al, 2018;Marquardt, 2020). A prominent example is the work by Baker et al (2016).…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Measure of 19th Century US Suicides

Kronenberg

2021

Soc Indic Res

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Suicides hurt families and the US economy with an annual cost of $69 billion. However, little is known about what determined suicide rates in the past. This is likely due to the lack of consistent data prior to the 20th century. In this article, I propose using newspaper suicide mentions for the period 1840–1910 as a proxy measure for suicide and perform several validation exercises. I show that the stylized facts like suicides drop during wars holds for suicide mentions. I also validate the newspaper suicide mentions against sparse suicide mortality data and a novel valence measure. This new measure can be used to assess the relationship between suicides and numerous policy changes happening in the 19th century that previously could not be explored. It thus offers a new research avenue for quantitative historical analyses, which can inform current policy via novel historical insights.

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Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Measure of 19th Century US Suicides

Kronenberg

2021

Soc Indic Res

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“…For further information regarding the newspaper data, I refer to Kronenberg (2021) and the Chronicling America website. 7 In essence, this dataset is an example of textual corpora available to answer exciting questions relating to economic history (Gutmann et al, 2018).…”

Section: Newspaper Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

New(spaper) evidence of a reduction in suicide mentions during the 19th century US gold rush

Kronenberg

2021

Health Economics

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The relationship between the aggregate economic situation and mortality has been the focus of many studies since Ruhm (2000). Prior work using US data has estimated that for most causes of mortality, improvements in the overall economy lead to lower mortality (Fishback et al., 2007;Ruhm, 2000). The consistent exception to this is suicides. The US Suicide Prevention Resource Center reports the total costs of all attempted and completed suicides to be $93.5 billion per year (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2019). However, except for Fishback et al. ( 2007), there are no causal estimates of how aggregate economic changes affect suicides. 1 In this paper, I estimate the relationship between the arguably exogenous change in the economy induced by gold mining and suicide mentions. It is hard to think of an exogenous change in this context as that change needs to affect an entire economy sufficiently to affect suicides. At the same time, it needs to be unexpected such that people cannot adjust their behavior in anticipation of the change. I exploit the US gold rush as an event that plausibly fulfills these criteria. The gold rush was unexpected and peaked very fast, with mined gold making up 3.5% of nominal federal GDP. 2 I use two-way fixed-effect estimation to show that the gold rush reduced suicides. The analysis is performed on a state-year panel that consists of values for mined gold from 1840 to 1860 and suicide mentions per 100,000 pages in regional newspapers as a proxy for suicides (Kronenberg, 2021).

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“…The development of 4D has the potential to cover more areas and in greater depth than the exploitation of IPUMS, the integrated public use microdata series has been done so far (Mitchener 2015 ). On the other hand, a major contribution to this toolbox has been the geographic information systems (GIS) that, by incorporating the time dimension, have become very useful in the field of social sciences (Gutmann et al 2018 ). GIS consists of an integrated database management system with a mapping tool that allows easy representation of data using maps but also integrates scattered information using location as a nexus and analyzes data spatially.…”

Section: The Road Networkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Complex networks to understand the past: the case of roads in Bourbon Spain

2020

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The work aims to study, using GIS techniques and network analysis, the development of the road network in Spain during the period between the War of Succession and the introduction of the railway (1700-1850). Our research is based on a detailed cartographic review of maps made during the War of Succession, largely improving preexisting studies based on books of itineraries from the sixteenth century onwards. We build a new, complete map of the main roads at the beginning of the eighteenth century along with the matrix of transport costs for all the important towns describing the communications network. Our study of this complex network, supplemented by a counterfactual analysis carried out using a simulation model based on agents using different centralized decision-making processes, allows us to establish three main results. First, existing trade flows at the beginning of the eighteenth century had a radial structure, so the Bourbon infrastructure plan only consolidated a preexisting situation. Second, the development of the network did not suppose important alterations in the comparative centrality of the regions. Finally, the design of the paved road network was adequate for the economic needs of the country. These findings are in stark contrast with claims that the radial structure of the Bourbon roads was designed ex-novo with political or ideological objectives rather than economic ones. Our methodology paves the way to further studies of path-dependent, long-term processes of network design as the key to understanding the true origin of many currently existing situations.

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“Big Data” in Economic History

Cited by 34 publications

References 186 publications

A New Measure of 19th Century US Suicides

A New Measure of 19th Century US Suicides

New(spaper) evidence of a reduction in suicide mentions during the 19th century US gold rush

Complex networks to understand the past: the case of roads in Bourbon Spain

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