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Short Description: From Ancien Régime to Capitalism: The Spread of the French Revolution as a Natural ... advantage of having participated in the French Revolution and in the ...
Content Inside: Daron Acemoglu1 Davide Cantoni2 Simon Johnson3 James A. Robinson4 From Ancien Régime to Capitalism: The Spread of the French Revolution as a Natural Experiment5 March 2007; Revised January 2008 Abstract In this paper we exploit the invasion of Germany by French Revolutionary armies as a `natural experiment' to investigate the causal effect of some of the main institutions of the ancien régime on economic development. A hypothesis which can account for comparative development within Europe is that economic growth emerged first in places which earliest reformed their institutions from those which characterized the ancien régime. However, though there is a correlation between these two events, this does not demonstrate that it was the erosion of the ancien régime was a causal factor in the rise of capitalism. This is because there may be problems of reverse causation and omitted variable bias. We show how the institutional reforms (essentially the abolition of key ancien régime institutions) brought by the French to Germany can be exploited to resolve these problems. These reforms were akin to an exogenous change in institutions unrelated to the underlying economic potential of the areas reformed. We can therefore compare the economic performance of the areas reformed to those not reformed, before and after the Revolutionary period, to examine the impact of the reforms. The evidence we present is consistent with the hypothesis that some of the institutions of the ancien régime did indeed impede capitalism, though there is also some evidence that the places which were reformed may have been developing more rapidly before 1800. 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, E52-380, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142; e-mail: daron@mit.edu. 2Harvard University, Department of Economics, Littauer Center, Cambridge, MA 02138; e-mail: cantoni@fas.harvard.edu. 3Massachusetts Institute of Technology and International Monetary Fund, Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA 02319; e-mail: sjohnson@mit.edu. 4Harvard University, Department of Government, IQSS, 1737 Cambridge Street N309, Cambridge, MA 01238; e-mail: jrobinson@gov.harvard.edu. 5This paper has been prepared for the American Historical Review. We thank Robert Schneider, three anonymous referees, Regina Baar, Jared Diamond and Philip Hoffman for their comments and suggestions and Leopoldo Fergusson, Camilo García, Tarek Hassan and Jutta Hoppe for excellent research assistance. 1
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