COAL SMOKE AND MORTALITY IN AN EARLY INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY

Air pollution was severe in the nineteenth century, yet its health consequences are often overlooked due to a lack of pollution data. We offer a new approach for inferring local coal use levels based on local industrial structure and industry-specific coal use intensity. This allows us to provide the first estimates of the mortality effects of British industrial coal use in 1851-60. Exploiting wind patterns for identification, we find that a one standard deviation increase in coal use raised infant mortality by 6-8% and that industrial coal use explains roughly one-third of the urban mortality penalty observed during this period.