Research

Does welfare retrenchment cause social unrest? I study this question by using parish-level expenditure on poor relief from post-Napoleonic England and applying generative AI to a corpus of 3.9 million newspaper column transcriptions to collect the category, date and location for each reported unrest incident. Reduced-form analysis leveraging a shift-share instrument finds a causal effect of welfare retrenchment on social unrest between 1819 and 1831, attributable to grievances arising from social and habitual comparisons. Simulations from a counterfactual analysis assuming blanket increases in welfare expenditure highlight the significance of social welfare provision in preventing large-scale unrest.