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Kelly, Morgan
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Kelly, Morgan
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Kelly, Morgan
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 43
- PublicationPrecocious Albion: a new interpretation of the British industrial revolution(University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2013-09)
; ; Why was Britain the cradle of the Industrial Revolution? Answers vary: some focus on resource endowments, some on institutions, some on the role of empire. In this paper, we argue for the role of labour force quality or human capital. Instead of dwelling on mediocre schooling and literacy rates, we highlight instead the physical condition of the average British worker and his higher endowment of skills. These advantages meant that British workers were more productive and better paid than their Continental counterparts and better equipped to capitalize on the technological opportunities and challenges confronting them. non-peer-reviewed2290 - PublicationTechnological Dynamism in a Stagnant Sector: Safety at Sea during the Early Industrial RevolutionAgainst the consensus that sailing ship technology was stagnant during the early Industrial Revolution, we find striking improvements in safety at sea. Between 1760 and 1825, the risk of being wrecked for Atlantic shipping fell by one third, and of foundering by two thirds, reflecting improvements in seaworthiness and navigation respectively. Seaworthiness improved through replacing the traditional stepped deck ship with stronger flushed decked ones derived from Indian designs, and the increasing use of iron reinforcement. Improved navigation owed little to precise longitude estimation and stemmed mostly from accurate charts and instruments, and accessible manuals of navigational technique.
260 - PublicationChange points and temporal dependence in reconstructions of annual temperature : did Europe experience a little Ice Age?We analyze the timing and extent of northern European temperature falls during the Little Ice Age, using standard temperature reconstructions. However, we can find little evidence of long swings or structural breaks in European weather before the twentieth century. Instead, European weather between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries resembles uncorrelated draws from a distribution with a constant mean (although there are decades of markedly lower summer temperature); with the same behaviour holding more tentatively back to the twelfth century. Our results suggest that the existing consensus about a Little Ice Age in Europe may stem from a Slutsky effect, where the standard climatological practice of smoothing data before analysis gives the spurious appearance of irregular oscillations.
485 - PublicationDirect Standard Errors for Regressions with Spatially Autocorrelated ResidualsRegressions using data with known locations are increasingly used in empirical economics, and several standard error corrections are available to deal with the fact that their residuals tend to be spatially correlated. Unfortunately, different corrections commonly return significance levels that vary by several orders of magnitude, leaving the researcher uncertain as to which, if any, is valid. This paper proposes instead an extremely fast and simple procedure to derive standard errors directly from the spatial correlation structure of regression residuals. Importantly, because the estimated covariance matrix gives optimal weights to predict each residual as a linear combination of all residuals, the reliability of these standard errors is self-checking by construction. The approach extends immediately to instrumental variables, and balanced and unbalanced panels, as well as a wide class of nonlinear models. A step by step guide to estimating these standard errors is given in the accompanying tutorials.
159 - PublicationThe waning of the little ice ageThe ramifications of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures straddling several centuries in northwestern Europe, reach far beyond meteorology into economic, political, and cultural history. The LIA has spawned a series of resonant images that range from frost fairs to contracting glaciers, and from disappearing vineyards to disappearing Viking colonies. This paper takes issue with these images, and argues that the phenomena they describe can be explained without resort to climate change.
417 - PublicationTechnological progress under learning by imitationWe analyse technological progress when knowledge has a large tacit component so that transmission of knowledge takes place through direct personal imitation. It is shown that the rate of technological progress depends on the number of innovators in the same knowledge network. Assuming the diffusionof knowledge to mirror the geographical pattern of trade -the greater the trade between two sites, the greater the probability that technical knowledge flows between them- we show that a gradual expansion of trade causes a sudden rise in the rate of technological progress.
488 - PublicationIndustrial policy on the frontier: lessons from the first two industrial revolutionsIn this paper we revisit the histories of the first and second industrial revolutions, focussing on the experiences of countries that were already rich by the standards of the time, on or close to the technological frontier, and which could reasonably have aspired to industrial and economic leadership. Did governments intervene to promote economic growth, technological change, or industrial leadership, and if so what form did these interventions take? Were some strategies more successful than others, and if so why? The paper is structured thematically rather than chronologically, since we lack the space required to provide a proper narrative history. In the remainder of this introduction we make some general points about the history of industrial policy, beginning with a discussion of the variety of forms that it has taken over time.
29 - PublicationDeveloping rotten institutionsThis paper models corruption as optimal parasitism in organizations where teams of agents are weakly restrained by principals. Each agent takes on part of the role of principal, choosing how much to invest in policing to repress corruption in others and how rapaciously to act when unpoliced opportunities arise. This simple model incorporates most of the factors stressed in empirical analyses of corruption, and gives rise to a wide variety of equilibria. Allow income to co-evolve with corruption, we show how adding corruption to a textbook exogenous growth model leads to a Lucas paradox. When income and corruption affect each other suffciently strongly, economies converge to two corner equilibria despite diminishing returns to capital: a rich, clean corner and a poor, corrupt one; a pattern that appears to characterize international data. This paper is part of the International Trade and Investment Programme of the Geary Institute at UCD.
148 - PublicationThe Preventive Check in Medieval and Pre-industrial EnglandEngland’s post-Reformation demographic regime has been characterized as 'low pressure'. Yet the evidence hitherto for the presence of a preventive check, defined as the short-run response of marriage and births to variations in living standards, is rather weak. New evidence in this paper strengthens the case for the preventive check in both medieval and early modern England. We invoke manorial data to argue the case for a preventive check on marriages in the middle ages. Our analysis of the post-1540 period, based on parish-level rather than aggregate data, finds evidence for a preventive check on marriages and births.
430 - PublicationOn the likely extent of falls in Irish house pricesLooking at house price cycles across the OECD since 1970, we find a strong relationship between the size of the initial rise in price and its subsequent fall. Were this relationship to hold for Ireland, it would predict falls of real house prices of 40 to 60 per cent over a period of 8 to 9 years. The unusually large size of the Irish house building industry suggest that any significant house price fall that does occur could impose a difficult adjustment on the economy.
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