Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stephen Redding, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, discussed “The Distributional Consequences of Trade: Evidence from the Grain Invasion,” a paper joint with Stephan Heblich (Universtiy of Toronto) and Yanos Zylberberg (University of Bristol).
PARTICIPANTS
Stephen Redding, John Taylor, Annelise Anderson, Hoyt Bleakley, Michael Bordo, David Brady, Doug Branch, John Cochrane, Steve Davis, Dixon Doll, Bob Hall, Amy Handlan, Rick Hanushek, Patrick Kehoe, David Laidler, Charles Leung, Elena Pastorino, Valerie Ramey, Tom Stephenson, Jack Tatom, Yevgeniy Teryoshin, Alexander Zentefis
ISSUES DISCUSSED
Stephen Redding, Professor of Economics at Princeton University, discussed “The Distributional Consequences of Trade: Evidence from the Grain Invasion,” a paper joint with Stephan Heblich (Universtiy of Toronto) and Yanos Zylberberg (University of Bristol).
John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution, was the moderator.
PAPER SUMMARY
We examine the distributional consequences of trade using the New World Grain Invasion that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. We use a newly-created dataset on population, employment by sector, property values, and poor law transfers for over 10,000 parishes in England and Wales from 1801–1901. In response to this trade shock, we show that locations with high wheat suitability experience population decline, rural-urban migration, structural transformation away from agriculture, increases in welfare transfers, and declines in property values, relative to locations with low wheat suitability. We develop a quantitative spatial model to evaluate the income distributional consequences of this trade shock. Undertaking counterfactuals for the Grain Invasion, we show that geography is an important dimension along which these income distributional consequences occur.
To read the paper click the following link
https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/papers/LLCL.pdf
To read the slides, click the following link
https://www.princeton.edu/~reddings/papers/LLCL_present_8Oct2024_dist.pdf