DONDENA Seminar - Nikolaus Wolf
“Fickle Fossils. Economic Growth, Coal and the European Oil Invasion, 1900-2015”
ABSTRACT: Fossil fuels have shaped the European economy since the industrial revolution. In this paper, we analyse the effect of coal and oil on long-run economic growth, exploiting variation at the level of European NUTS-2 and NUTS-3 regions over the last century. We show that an “oil invasion” in the early 1960s turned regional coal abundance from a blessing into a curse, using new detailed data on carboniferous strata as an instrument. Moreover, we show that human capital accumulation was the key mechanism behind this reversal of fortune. Using a mediation analysis we establish that nearly all of the negative effect of coal on economic growth was due to an indirect effect of coal that limited educational attainment. However, we also find that regions with a higher density of established urban areas before the onset of the industrial revolution were more capable to adjust to the decline of coal, and some of these actually managed to fully adjust to the “oil invasion”.
BIO: Nikolaus Wolf (http://nikolauswolf.eu) holds the Chair of Economics and Economic History at Humboldt University Berlin, where he has taught since 2010. He is an economic historian with interests in trade, economic geography, international macroeconomics and social identity. After studies of economics and history in Freiburg, Gdansk, London and Berlin, he received his MSc in economics from Humboldt University Berlin in 2000, his MSc in history from Free University Berlin in 2001, and his PhD in economics from Humboldt University Berlin in 2003. Previously he held positions at the University of Warwick, Free University Berlin and the London School of Economics. Between 2013-2019, he was Editor in Chief of the European Review of Economic History. In 2018 he was awarded the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society, together with Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Stephen Redding and Daniel Sturm. He is a research fellow at CEPR and CESifo.
You may follow the seminar online via ZOOM Meetings at the following link: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/98057654113