I have a new working paper out. It is co-authored with Casey Pender of Carleton University and Jamie Pavlik of Texas Tech University (two of my favorite buddies and Casey is on the job market this year so you better hire him before someone else does). The paper concerns the Wheat Boom of Canada during the 1890s — a highly debated topic in Canadian history. Many argued that it contributed mightily to economic growth while others contested that in famous papers that were published in Journal of Political Economy and the Canadian Journal of Economics. The debates have stagnated with multiple unconvincing backs and forths. In our paper, we aim to break the deadlock and provide final resolution. We use improved GDP data and new causal inference methods that allow us to be agnostic regarding modeling. The results? The wheat boom caused a major acceleration in Canadian economic growth (more than 1 percentage point) between 1896 and 1913. The abstract is below and the SSRN paper is here .
In the last years of the 19th century, Canada experienced a “wheat boom”. Since the 1960s, historians and economists have debated whether the boom meaningfully accelerated economic growth. A resolution has been elusive notably because of issues of data quality regarding growth in the decades before the boom and the assumptions of the counterfactual scenarios drawn to evaluate the causal effect of the boom. We use newly corrected national output data alongside previously unavailable econometric tests such as synthetic control methods to break the deadlock. We find that there was indeed a structural break in growth in the late 19th century. We also are able to state that this break was unique to Canada and that it explains 36% to 40% of the growth observed during the period — an estimate that is closer to the most optimistic ones in the literature.
Vincent Geloso 