Effects of the Black Death: Growth of Europe relative to the rest of the world, demise of serfdom in Western Europe, decline in the authority of religious institutions, and emergence of stronger states

Jedwab, Remi and Johnson, Noel D. and Koyama, Mark, The Economic Impact of the Black Death (August 18, 2020). SSRN, Aug 18 2020. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3689980

Abstract: The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history. We review the evidence for the origins, spread, and mortality of the disease. We document that it was a plausibly exogenous shock to the European economy and trace out its aggregate and local impacts in both the short-run and the long-run. The initial effect of the plague was highly disruptive. Wages and per capita income rose. But, in the long-run, this rise was only sustained in some parts of Europe. The other indirect long-run effects of the Black Death are associated with the growth of Europe relative to the rest of the world, especially Asia and the Middle East (the Great Divergence), a shift in the economic geography of Europe towards the Northwest (the Little Divergence), the demise of serfdom in Western Europe, a decline in the authority of religious institutions, and the emergence of stronger states. Finally, avenues for future research are laid out.

Keywords: Pandemics; Black Death; Institutions; Cities; Urbanization; Malthusian Theory; Demography; Long-Run Growth; Middle Ages; Europe; Asia
JEL Classification: N00; N13; I15; I14; J11; O10; O43

---
Numerous scholars are interested in the emergence of the rule of law and “inclusive institutions” (e.g. Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, 2019). One aspect of this is the protection of minorities. Finley and Koyama (2018) study the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire and show that political decentralization and fragmentation was dangerous for minority groups: the fact that no one ruler had an encompassing interest in protecting Jews made violence more likely. Specifically, using data from Germania Judaica for the entirety of the Holy Roman Empire and covering 340 Jewish communities, Finley and Koyama (2018) construct an ordinal measure of pogrom intensity. They find that the persecution of Jews was more violent in communities governed by bishoprics, archbishoprics, and imperial free cities. Specifically, they had a 20-25% higher “intensity score” meaning that Jews in those cities were more likely to be “wiped out” or “killed in large numbers”. In contrast, Jews were less vulnerable in territories ruled either by the emperor or by one of the major secular electors. These findings suggest that in the absence of the rule of law, minority groups are better protected under an autocrat and that they are especially vulnerable when power is contested.