Title: The Distributional Consequences of Trade: Evidence from the Grain Invasion (with Stephen Redding and Yanos Zylberberg).

Here is the abstract:

We provide new evidence on the income distributional consequences of trade using the

New World Grain Invasion in the 19th Century and variation in agroclimatic suitability for

wheat across locations within England and Wales. We show that this large-scale agricultural

trade shock led to structural transformation away from agriculture and a redistribution of

population from rural to urban areas. We develop a quantitative spatial model to rationalize

our empirical findings and evaluate the aggregate implications of this international trade

shock. We use our model to undertake counterfactuals for the Grain invasion, holding constant

other exogenous determinants of economic activity. We find modest aggregate welfare

gains combined with much larger income distributional effects, with geography an important

dimension along which these income distributional effects occur.