The rise of European cities: Technology, institutions, and growth

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economics of cities in Europe over the transition to the era of modern, capitalist growth.;The first essay examines the signal innovation in early modern information technology---the movable type printing press. Previous research has found no evidence of its impact in measures of aggregate productivity or income. This paper exploits city-level data on the establishment of printing presses in 15th century Europe. I find that between 1500 and 1600, cities where printing presses were established in the late 1400s grew at least 60 percent faster than similar cities which were not early adopters. Between 1500 and 1800, print cities grew 25 percent faster. I show that cities that adopted printing had no prior advantage and that the association between adoption and subsequent growth was not due to printers anticipating city growth. My findings imply that the diffusion of printing accounted for 20-60 percent of city growth 1500-1600 and 5-50 percent of city growth 1500-1800.;The second paper analyzes the emergence of Zipf's Law, which characterizes city Populations as obeying a distributional power law and is supposedly one of the most robust regularities in all of economics. This Paper shows that Zipf's Law emerged only between 1500 and 1800. Before 1500, land and land-intensive intermediates entered city production as quasi-fixed factors, generating decreasing returns to scale. Through 1500, big cities grew relatively slowly and were far smaller than Zipf's Law would lead us to expect. As trade and sing agricultural productivity relaxed the land constraint, growth became independent of size and Zipf's Law emerged.;The third paper examines the institutional determinants of city growth. I find that laws limiting labor mobility in Eastern Europe were associated with two factors that generate persistent deviations from Zipf's Law: low variation in growth rates and a negative association between city sizes and growth rates. These legal institutions were also associated with the loss of several centuries of catch-up growth in Eastern European cities - a 1/3 reduction in city growth between 1500 and 1800.