Economic History Field Seminar: Eric Chaney

Abstract

This paper derives a new proxy for preindustrial economic activity from library, biographical and manuscript collections. A two-pronged statistical framework exploits variation in the number of authors affiliated with a city to provide a high-frequency measure of differential economic development and to improve existing city growth estimates. I illustrate how this proxy facilitates analysis in data scarce environments by revisiting the rise of Europe’s Atlantic traders and documenting the enduring impact of the Mongol invasions for the first time.