Recessions, Mortality, and Migration Bias: Evidence from the Lancashire Cotton Famine∗ Vellore Arthi Brian Beach W. Walker Hanlon UC Irvine Vanderbilt University NYU Stern and NBER and NBER December 11, 2019 Abstract We examine the health effects of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, a sharp down- turn in Britain's cotton textile manufacturing regions that was induced by the U.S. Civil War. Migration was an important response to this downturn, but as we document, migration also introduces a number of empirical challenges, which we overcome by introducing a new methodological approach. Our results indicate that the recession increased mortality among households employed in the cotton textile industry. We also document localized spillover effects on households providing non-tradeable services in the areas affected by the reces- sion. JEL Codes: I1, J60, N33 ∗Arthi:
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[email protected]. We thank James Feigenbaum, James Fenske, Joe Ferrie, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Tim Hatton, Taylor Jaworski, Amir Jina, Shawn Kantor, Carl Kitchens, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Doug Miller, Grant Miller, Christopher Ruhm, William Strange; audiences at the 2017 ASSA Annual Meeting, 2017 NBER Cohort Studies Meeting, 2017 PAA Annual Meeting, 2017 SDU Workshop on Applied Microeconomics, 2018 All-California Labor Economics Conference, and 2018 NBER DAE Spring Meeting; and seminar participants at Columbia, Cornell, Essex, Florida State, Michigan, Princeton, Queen's, Queen's Belfast, RAND, Toronto, UC Davis, and Warwick; for helpful comments. For funding, we thank the UCLA Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Program in Real Estate, Finance and Urban Economics, the California Center for Population Research, the UCLA Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant Fund, and the National Science Foundation (CAREER Grant No.