Caselaw and England's economic performance during the Industrial Revolution: Data and evidence
Peter Grajzl, Peter Murrell
,
1
(
52
)
Journal of Comparative Economics
145-165
March
2024
Abstract
We generate and analyze data pertinent to examining whether developments in caselaw were consequential for England's economic performance during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then add a real per-capita GDP series to our caselaw series and estimate a structural VAR featuring a linear time trend. Our evidence shows that caselaw developments were an important determinant of economic fluctuations.