Bol og By

The role of agricultural productivity for long-run economic development has been much debated (e.g. Christiaensen et al., 2011). As noted by Tsakok and Gardner (2007), a fundamental challenge to understanding whether agricultural productivity is a driver of long-run development is that causality is hard to establish. In the present paper, we estimate the causal effect of a large shock to agricultural productivity—namely the introduction of the heavy plow in the Middle Ages—on long-run development.