Essays in Economic History: Trade Protection, Political Economy and Social Mobility

Chapter 1 examines the effects of trade protection and women labour on the Japanese cotton spinning industry during the WWI. In the first part, I study whether export opportunities for the cotton weaving industry following the decline in British cotton textile exports to Asia, led to the development of its intermediate good producing, cotton spinning industry. I find that at the extensive margin, more factories were built in prefectures located closer to ports after the WWI. However, at the intensive margin, factories located further inland installed more spindles, employed more workers and produced more output during and after the war. Additionally, these factories were smaller before the war, suggesting that excess demand during WWI allowed them to catch up with coastal factories. In the second part, I study whether the gender composition of workers affected how cotton spinning factories responded to the new demands during WWI. Factories with a higher share of women workers in 1913 increased the spindles operated per worker while reducing their workforce, but saw no proportional increase in total yarn output or labor productivity. Overall, results suggest that these factories were quick to undertake measures to streamline their production process. Chapter 2 is a joint work with Roberto Bonfatti and Bjoern Brey. We study the long-run political economy effects of a temporary trade protection from British imports during the WWI in Colonial India. In the first part of our paper, we study the effects of the WWI trade shock on firm-level profits and formation of political connections with the pro-independence party, Indian National Congress (INC). We measure political connections as the share of directors that corresponded with Gandhi. For this purpose, we make use of a novel data source: the complete collection of letters and speeches written by Gandhi. We construct the firm-level WWI trade shock by leveraging both the district-level variation in trade costs and the industry-wide variation in drop of British imports. Using firm-level panel data constructed from the \textit{Investors India Yearbook}, we find that more protected firms during the WWI generated more profits during and just after the war, and became more politically connected with the INC. In the second part of the paper, we find that more politically connected firms generated more profits, but only after independence. Using a two-stage least squares approach, we show that firms that became more politically connected after the WWI also generated more profits after independence. Overall, the results suggest protected firms turned into lobbyists, demanding for more protection. In Chapter 3, I study how ties with more elite peers affect the upward mobility of non-elites. For this purpose, I construct a novel data source comprising of over 37000 high school graduates across five provinces in colonial India between 1894 to 1919. I examine the effects of elite peers, defined as upper-caste graduates, on higher education and occupational outcomes of non-elites. Exploiting the plausibly random variation in the share of elite peers across all cohorts within the same high school, I find that exposure to more elite peers reduces the probability that non-elite graduates, particularly those from merchant castes, complete university or become lawyers. Exploiting the variation in ranks between the different merchant castes, I show that elites had a more negative effect on lower-ranked merchant castes, suggesting that differences in social rank played an important role in their interactions with non-elites. I find that negative effects are strongest in private schools run by Indian elites and among those students who graduated high school with the lowest ranks. Overall, the results imply that in settings where elites and non-elites are soically distant from each other due to social rank, exposure to elite peers in elite-dominated schools may hinder upward mobility of non-elites.