The potato's contribution to population and urbanization: evidence from a historical experiment.

By Nathan Nunn, Nancy Qian. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011

865 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. Additional evidence from within-country comparisons of city populations and adult heights also confirms the cross-country findings.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9a71c4b16e99103f420bd49194a0c6c7a1536a7

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Citations in the corpus

The Effect of the Tsetse Fly on African Development (2015, background): “As can be seen in Figure 1, the suitability of land for agriculture (see Nunn and Qian 2011 for a description) and the TSI are positively correlated.”
The effects of land markets on resource allocation and agricultural productivity (2017, positive): “To more rigorously assess that the treatment and control groups share the same trend before 2013/14 wave, we conduct a placebo test following Nunn and Qian (2011). We consider the di↵erence-in-di↵erence specification between land certification and rentals using the same 7We do not use the 2011/12 wa”
Dif-in-Dif Estimators of Multiplicative Treatment Effects (2014, neutral): “For example, Nunn and Qian (2011) refer to concerns about skewness, whereas DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) state that they wish to account for percentage changes in the control variables.”
Weather Shocks, Sweet Potatoes and Peasant Revolts in Historical China (2014, neutral): “Historical weather data come from the State Meteorological Society (1981), which gives annual information on weather for locations throughout China back to 1470.”
Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment (2015, neutral): “Table IV exploits the panel dimension of our city population data, replicating the specification from Nunn and Qian (2011). This specification includes city fixed effects, absorbing all unobserved characteristics that do not vary over time.”
Jobs and climate policy: Evidence from British Columbia's revenue-neutral carbon tax (2017, methodology): “This approach is inspired by Nunn and Qian (2011).”
Violence Against Women: A Cross-Cultural Analysis for Africa (2016, background): “[38] Nunn, N.”
Locomotives of Local Growth: The Short- and Long-Term Impact of Railroads in Sweden (2017, background): “Ideas and new technologies 3See, for instance, Cantoni (2011), Dittmar (2011), and Nunn and Qian (2011) for recent contributions that also rely on city populations as a proxy for economic activity in a historical setting.”
Two Blades of Grass: The Impact of the Green Revolution (2016, background): “…agriculture on long-run development patterns (Easterly (2007)); the eﬀects of the adoption of potatoes in Europe following the Columbian Exchange (Nunn and Qian (2011), the impact of agricultural productivity improvements on local non-agricutlural development (Bustos et al. (2013)); and the…”
Temporary Protection and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the Napoleonic Blockade (2014, background): “Data on city populations across the territory of the French Empire is from Nunn and Qian (2011).”
The Caloric Costs of Culture: Evidence from Indian Migrants (2016, neutral): “Finally, this study is related to Nunn and Qian ( 2011 ) .”