Economics Research Seminar – Professor Nuno Palma

Title: Justices of the Peace: Legal Foundations of the Industrial Revolution

Date: 02 October 2024

Time: 13:30 – 14:30

Venue: NUBS.4.23

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

Justices of the Peace: Legal Foundations of the Industrial Revolution

Speaker:  Professor Nuno Palma

Nuno Palma is Professor of Economics, and Director of the Arthur Lewis Lab for Comparative Development, at the University of Manchester. He is also a Research Fellow at ICS, University of Lisbon, and at CEPR. https://sites.google.com/site/npgpalma/home

Abstract:

We argue that state legal and collective capacity contributed to economic development during the Industrial Revolution. In England and Wales, the Monarchy and Parliament relied on local magistrates, known as Justices of the Peace (JPs), to enforce property rights, resolve disputes, and administer local public services. We assemble a unique dataset to document the expanding role of JPs in the economy during the eighteenth century. We find that counties with greater legal capacity – proxied by the number of JPs – in 1700 experienced greater population growth and more structural change over the following 140 years. Plausibly exogenous variation in the allocation of JPs to areas, driven by historical political factors, suggests a causal interpretation of the findings. Additional results show that more legal capacity led to more human capital, fiscal capacity, and infrastructure development. Together, the results suggest that the JPs were an important and under-appreciated “street-level” institution that helped to create the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution.