Epidemics and urban growth : the impact of cholera in Nineteenth-century Prussia

Summary

The literature has long studied the economic consequences of epidemics. While plague and influenza episodes have received substantial attention by researchers, the same does not apply to cholera outbreaks. We examine the impact of cholera in urban Prussia during the 19th century with two novel datasets containing detailed information on cholera mortality and population growth for almost one thousand cities. Our results show that cities experiencing an additional one-percentage-point increase in cholera mortality grew ca. 0.5% less right after an epidemic. This size effect is representative of the three pandemic periods we consider, namely 1831–1837, 1848–1859 and 1865–1874. In addition, we find that post-epidemic growth recovery was rather fast during the second and fourth pandemics, but somewhat sluggish during the third one. We consider three factors that can account for post-epidemic trajectories–market potential, prevalence of rural serfdom and degree of industrialization–through their influence on labor supply and demand. Our results suggest that the flow of unskilled short-distance migration to urban areas during the second pandemic possibly reduced the labor supply shock induced by cholera. In subsequent pandemics, however, a mixture of labor supply and demand constraints created a context where relative recovery after the epidemic outbreaks happened in some places but not others. In particular, peaks in Transatlantic migration could have led to increased competition for migrants and therefore lower overall labor supply. Also, depressed labor demand could have reduced economic opportunities in shocked cities characterized by increasing returns.