Nico Voigtlaender

We analyze the rise of the first socio-economic institution in history that limited fertility – long before the Demographic Transition. The "European Marriage Pattern" (EMP) raised the marriage age of women and ensured that many remained celibate, thereby reducing childbirths by up to one third between the 14th and 18th century. To explain the rise of EMP we build a two-sector model of agricultural production – grain and livestock. Women have a comparative advantage in the latter because plow agriculture requires physical strength. After the Black Death in 1348-50, land abundance triggered a shift towards the land-intensive pastoral sector, improving female employment prospects. Because women working in animal husbandry had to remain unmarried, more farm service spelled later marriages. The resulting reduction in fertility led to a new Malthusian steady state with lower population pressure and higher wages. The model can thus help to explain the divergence in income per capita between Europe and Asia long before the Industrial Revolution. Using detailed data from England after 1290, we provide strong evidence for our mechanism. Where pastoral agriculture dominated, more women worked as servants, and marriage occurred markedly later. Overall, we estimate that pastoral farming raised female ages at first marriage by more than 4 years.

This paper presents a novel stylized fact and analyzes its contribution to the skill bias of technical change in U.S. manufacturing. The share of skilled labor embedded in intermediate inputs correlates strongly with the skill share employed in final production. This finding points towards an intersectoral technology-skill complementarity (ITSC). Together with input-output linkages, the observed complementarity delivers a multiplier that reinforces skill demand along the production chain. Reduced-form estimates suggest that the effect is quantitatively important, explaining about as much skill upgrading as outsourcing. Empirical evidence suggests that one channel through which this complementarity works is product innovation. The empirical analysis also sheds light on the importance of different drivers of skill upgrading over time. While outsourcing and IT capital boosted skill demand particularly strongly from the 1980s onwards (a period of rapidly increasing skill premia), R&D and ITSC contributed stably throughout the period 1958–2005.

How did Europe escape the "Iron Law of Wages?" We construct a simple Malthusian model with two sectors and multiple steady states, and use it to explain why European per capita incomes and urbanization rates increased during the period 1350–1700. Productivity growth can only explain a small fraction of the rise in output per capita. Population dynamics – changes of the birth and death schedules – were far more important determinants of steady states. We show how a major shock to population can trigger a transition to a new steady state with higher per-capita income. The Black Death was such a shock, raising wages substantially. Because of Engel's Law, demand for urban products increased, and urban centers grew in size. European cities were unhealthy, and rising urbanization pushed up aggregate death rates. This effect was reinforced by diseases spread through war, financed by higher tax revenues. In addition, rising trade also spread diseases. In this way higher wages themselves reduced population pressure. We show in a calibration exercise that our model can account for the sustained rise in European urbanization as well as permanently higher per capita incomes in 1700, without technological change. Wars contributed importantly to the 'Rise of Europe,' even if they had negative short-run effects. We thus trace Europe's precocious rise to economic riches to interactions of the plague shock with the belligerent political environment and the nature of cities.

We analyze under which conditions intermarriage can be used as an indicator of tolerance, and whether such tolerant attitudes persisted in Germany during the last century. We find strong evidence for the persistence of tolerant attitudes towards intermarriage with Jews. At the same time, our empirical analysis also cautions against using intermarriage as a simple proxy for tolerance: The size of Jewish communities in the early 20th century is an important confounding factor.

How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we find local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe's population during 1348–50. We use plague-era pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. They reliably predict violence against Jews in the 1920s, votes for the Nazi Party, deportations after 1933, attacks on synagogues, and letters to Der Stürmer. We also identify areas where persistence was lower: cities with high levels of trade or immigration. Finally, we show that our results are not driven by political extremism or by different attitudes toward violence.

Malthusian conditions are a byword for stagnation. We argue that this view is wrong. Europe's relative riches in 1700 are best understood as the result of Malthusian forces favoring high per capita output. Favorable shifts in mortality and fertility schedules were responsible. Incomes between 1300 and 1800 rose because of two related but distinct European "inventions" – a peculiar marriage pattern and a specific mortality regime. These interacted with the political, social and economic environment in such a way as to make higher equilibrium incomes sustainable.

Why did England industrialize first? And why was Europe ahead of the rest of the world? Unified growth theory in the tradition of Galor and Weil (2000) and Galor and Moav (2002) captures the key features of the transition from stagnation to growth over time. Yet we know remarkably little about why industrialization occurred much earlier in some parts of the world than in others. To answer this question, we present a probabilistic two-sector model where the initial escape from Malthusian constraints depends on the demographic regime, capital deepening and the use of more differentiated capital equipment. Weather-induced shocks to agricultural productivity cause changes in prices and quantities, and affect wages. In a standard model with capital externalities, these fluctuations interact with the demographic regime and affect the speed of growth. Our model is calibrated to match the main characteristics of the English economy in 1700 and the observed transition until 1850. We capture one of the key features of the British Industrial Revolution emphasized by economic historians – slow growth of output and productivity. Fertility limitation is responsible for higher per capita incomes, and these in turn increase industrialization probabilities. The paper also explores the availability of nutrition for poorer segments of society. We examine the influence of redistributive institutions such as the Old Poor Law, and find they were not decisive in fostering industrialization. Simulations using parameter values for other countries show that Britain’s early escape was only partly due to chance. France could have moved out of agriculture and into manufacturing faster than Britain, but the probability was less than 25%. Contrary to recent claims in the literature, 18th century China had only a minimal chance to escape from Malthusian constraints.

This paper analyzes how access to imported inputs affects firms in developing countries, where domestically produced high-quality inputs are relatively costly. We build an O-Ring type model with quality complementarity across input tasks, ranking tasks by their qualitysensitivity. Because high-quality inputs are relatively cheap in international markets, firms use these instead of domestic inputs for quality-sensitive production steps. This substitution effect lowers the demand for domestic input quality (such as skilled labor), while it raises output quality. At the same time, the complementarity effect increases the return to quality in the remaining domestic tasks. This raises output quality further; it also increases the demand for domestic input quality (skills), counterbalancing the first effect. To provide evidence for this mechanism, we match high-resolution data from Chilean customs to a large firm-level panel for the period 1992-2005. In line with the model's predictions, importers use ceteris paribus a lower share of skilled workers, while their skill demand increases significantly with the quality of imports.

Gains from trade due to exporting can result from the reallocation of resources to more productive producers, or from efficiency increases within exporting firms over time. While there is strong evidence for the former, the latter has received little support in the data. Previous research has documented minuscule or no efficiency gains within exporting plants. This result is derived from revenue productivity measures and thus also reflects variation in prices. Using a census panel of Chilean manufacturing plants, we first show that, in line with the previous results, there is no evidence for within-plant increases in revenue productivity after export entry. We then derive product-plant level marginal cost and use it as an efficiency measure that is not affected by prices. We find that marginal costs drop substantially when plants begin to export -- on average by 15-25%. Prices drop by the same order of magnitude (while volume grows). Since new exports initially charge lower prices, revenue productivity measures fail to identify these within-plant efficiency gains from exporting.

What determines whether a new technology will be adopted by a wide array of sectors throughout the economy, turning it into a General Purpose Technology (GPT)? We build a model of endogenous innovation in a setup with heterogenous sectors. These are connected via input-output linkages, so that the economy is a network of interconnected technologies. When a new input is first adopted by a given sector, its market grows. This in turn provides incentives for product innovation in our quality-ladder model. With rising quality, the effective price of the new input falls, so that it is subsequently adopted by new sectors. This cascade of adoption follows the notion of "technology proximity" - a concept outlined by Helpman and Trajtenberg (1998), which we formalize in our model. The proximity of sectors is given by how closely they are connected via input-output linkages, using a standard measure from network theory (Conley and Dupor, 2003). In this way we can assign distances between any two sectors for every year where detailed U.S. input-output tables are available (5-year periods starting in 1963). In line with our model, the speed and extent of diffusion is strongly increasing in technological proximity.

While intermediate inputs account for more than half of a final product's value, intersectoral linkages have been ignored as a source of skill bias. This paper extends the theoretical skill-biased technical change (SBTC) framework, introducing many sectors with input-output linkages and innovation spillovers across sectors. New varieties within each sector require skilled workers, while costly standardization allows the employment of cheaper unskilled workers. Upstream product innovation lowers the cost of inventing new varieties downstream. This spillover leads to skill complementarity across sectors: When new varieties of a product become available, they facilitate product innovation in sectors that use these new varieties as intermediates; at both stages, new varieties are produced by skilled workers. This mechanism generates a multiplier effect that magnifies small sector-level skill bias into a large aggregate impact on skill demand. The paper provides strong empirical support for intersectoral skill complementarities. We calculate skill-specific productivity at the 4-digit U.S. manufacturing level and derive the relative skill bias. Combining the sector-specific skill bias with input-output data, we obtain the skill bias embedded in each sector's intermediates. This new variable – input skill bias – correlates strongly with the skill bias in final production.