Temporary Protection and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Napoleonic Blockade

Abstract

This paper uses a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of temporary trade protection on long-term economic development. I find that regions in the French Empire which became better protected from trade with the British for exogenous reasons during the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) increased capacity in mechanized cotton spinning to a larger extent than regions which remained more exposed to trade. In the long run, regions with exogenously higher spinning capacity had higher activity in mechanized cotton spinning. They also had higher value added per capita in industry up to the second half of the nineteenth century, but not later. (JEL F13, L67, N43, N63, N73)

Migrants, Ancestors, and Foreign Investments

“…Burchardi and Hassan (2013) use variation in wartime destruction across West German regions to show evidence of a causal effect of social ties on changes in GDP growth and FDI in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 5 Redding and Sturm (2008), Juhász (2018), and Steinwender (2018) study the effect of historical shocks on economic interactions across borders.…”

Emigration during the French Revolution: Consequences in the Short and Longue Durée

“…The …rst-stage results are reported in Table 3 where the instrument is the squared (absolute) standardized deviation from average temperature in the summer of 1792 in columns (1)-(3) (columns (4)-(6)). In all speci…cations and irrespective of the inclusion of geographic and historical controls, the estimates reveal that the squared and absolute temperature deviations in the summer 1 9 On the Eden Treaty, see, for example, Henderson (1957), and on the consequences of the disruption to international trade caused by the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, see, for example, Heckscher (1922), Crouzet (1964) and Juhász (2015). of 1792 are positively and signi…cantly correlated at the 1% level with variations in the share of émigrés across French départements.…”

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

“…Economic historians have spent considerable time investigating "the fuel of interest." For just a few examples, Petra Moser (2005) and Tom Nicholas (2011) show how the structure of the patent system affects the rate and direction of invention, while recent work like W. Walker Hanlon (2015) and Reka Juhasz (2018) explores the role of factor prices or market size. But far less is known about the second half of Lincoln's dichotomy.…”