Creameries, Conflict, and Institutions
How religion, energy shocks, and geography shaped industrial productivity in Danish and Irish creameries. Firm-level causal analysis.
Status: Active — co-authored
The late 19th century saw a wave of cooperative creamery formation across Denmark and Ireland. This cluster of papers uses firm-level data and causal designs to ask why some creameries succeeded and others didn’t.
One paper examines how religious divisions shaped cooperative formation and productivity — testing whether social capital and trust operate through denominational boundaries. A second paper exploits the geography of peat bogs as a natural experiment in energy access: proximity to peat (the dominant fuel) is a geographical lottery that allows clean identification of energy shocks on industrial productivity.
Together, the papers show how institutions, geography, and energy jointly determined the trajectory of early agricultural industrialization.
With co-authors.