Hanlon, W. Walker <br/><br/>
Coal Smoke, City Growth, and the Costs of the Industrial Revolution 

 - The Economic Journal   
 - 130(626), Feb, 2020: p.462-488 
<br/><br/> This article provides the first rigorous estimates of how industrial air pollution from coal burning affects long-run city growth. I introduce a new theoretically grounded strategy for estimating this relationship and apply it to data from highly polluted British cities from 1851 to 1911. I show that local industrial coal use substantially reduced long-run city employment and population growth. Moreover, a counterfactual analysis suggests that plausible improvements in coal-use efficiency would have led to a higher urbanisation rate in Britain by 1911. These findings contribute to our understanding of the effects of air pollution and the environmental costs of industrialisation. – Reproduced