IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sol/wpaper/2013-385126.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Bankruptcy Express: Market Integration, Organizational Changes, and Financial distress in 19th century Britain

Author

Listed:
  • Tobias Korn
  • Jean Lacroix

Abstract

This paper shows that amid aggregate gains, market integration generates within- sector reallocation. To measure this effect, we collected new data on personal bankrupt- cies during the rail expansion in 19th century Britain. Our estimators leverage within geography-time and within sector-time variation to measure sector-specific effects of the rail on both employment and bankruptcies. A connection to railway increased bankruptcies only in the manufacturing sector, despite simultaneously increasing em- ployment in that sector. Both a three-way fixed effects and a Least Cost Path approach validate the causality of our estimates. We further show that organizational changes that occurred in the manufacturing sector upon market integration explain our results: Firms expanded, self-employment decreased, occupations diversified; overall, the nature of labour changed. This biased growth of the manufacturing sector caused financial distress for some of its workers.

Suggested Citation

  • Tobias Korn & Jean Lacroix, 2024. "The Bankruptcy Express: Market Integration, Organizational Changes, and Financial distress in 19th century Britain," Working Papers CEB 24-016, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    • Handle: RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/385126
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/385126/3/wp24016.pdf
    File Function: Full text for the whole work, or for a work part
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stephan Heblich & Stephen J. Redding & Yanos Zylberberg, 2024. "The distributional consequences of trade: Evidence from the Grain Invasion," CEP Discussion Papers dp2033, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    2. Nicholas Crafts, 2022. "Slow real wage growth during the Industrial Revolution: productivity paradox or pro-rich growth? [Engels’ pause: technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the British industrial rev," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(1), pages 1-13.
    3. Carl Benedikt Frey & Thor Berger & Chinchih Chen, 2018. "Political machinery: did robots swing the 2016 US presidential election?," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 34(3), pages 418-442.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stephan Heblich & Stephen J. Redding & Hans-Joachim Voth, 2022. "Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution," NBER Working Papers 30451, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Sergei Guriev & Elias Papaioannou, 2022. "The Political Economy of Populism," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 60(3), pages 753-832, September.
    3. Jeffrey, Karen, 2020. "Automation and the Future of Work: How Rhetoric Shapes the Response in Policy Preferences," SocArXiv beqra, Center for Open Science.
    4. Gabriel Loumeau, 2022. "Land Consolidation Reforms: A Natural Experiment on the Economic and Political Effects of Agricultural Mechanization," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 22/376, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    5. Thomas Kurer & Nikolas Schöll, 2021. "How Technological Change Affects Regional Electorates," Working Papers 1269, Barcelona School of Economics.
    6. Moradi, Pegah, 2019. "Race, Ethnicity, and the Future of Work," SocArXiv e37cu, Center for Open Science.
    7. Aina Gallego & Thomas Kurer & Nikolas Schöll, 2018. "Not so disruptive after all: How workplace digitalization affects political preferences," Economics Working Papers 1623, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    8. Colantone, Italo & Ottaviano, Gianmarco & Stanig, Piero, 2021. "The backlash of globalization," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113860, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    9. Nicole Wu, 2023. "“Restrict foreigners, not robots”: Partisan responses to automation threat," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 505-528, July.
    10. Zhang, Baobao, 2021. "Public Opinion Toward Artificial Intelligence," OSF Preprints 284sm_v1, Center for Open Science.
    11. Brey, Björn, 2024. "The effect of recent technological change on US immigration policy," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 227(C).
    12. Klump, Rainer & Jurkat, Anne & Schneider, Florian, 2021. "Tracking the rise of robots: A survey of the IFR database and its applications," MPRA Paper 107909, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Gallego, Aina & Kurer, Thomas & Schöll, Nikolas, 2020. "Neither Left-Behind nor Superstar: Ordinary Winners of Digitalization at the Ballot," SocArXiv mu3tw, Center for Open Science.
    14. Giovanni Federico & Alessandro Nuvolari & Michelangelo Vasta, 2023. "Inequality in Pre‐Industrial Europe (1260–1850): New Evidence From the Labor Share," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 69(2), pages 347-375, June.
    15. Cuccu, Liliana & Pontarollo, Nicola, 2024. "Logistic hubs and support for radical-right populism: Evidence from Italy," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    16. François Facchini & Louis Jaeck, 2021. "Populism and the rational choice model: The case of the French National Front," Rationality and Society, , vol. 33(2), pages 196-228, May.
    17. Golin, M. & Rauh, C., 2022. "The Impact of Fear of Automation," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2269, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    18. Christian Gschwendt, 2022. "Routine job dynamics in the Swiss labor market," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, Springer;Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, vol. 158(1), pages 1-21, December.
    19. Thomas Ferguson & Benjamin Page & Jacob Rothschild & Jie Chen & Arturo Chang, 2018. "The Economic and Social Roots of Populist Rebellion: Support for Donald Trump in 2016," Working Papers Series 83, Institute for New Economic Thinking.
    20. Italo Colantone & Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano & Piero Stanig, 2021. "The Backlash of Globalization," CESifo Working Paper Series 9289, CESifo.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Bankruptcies; Economic Growth; Structural transformation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N63 - Economic History - - Manufacturing and Construction - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • L16 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics; Macroeconomic Industrial Structure
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • R40 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - General
    • K35 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Personal Bankruptcy Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/385126. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benoit Pauwels (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebulbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.