New media, firms, ideas, and growth: European cities after Gutenberg

Gutenberg's printing press was the great revolution in Renaissance information technology. This paper presents new evidence on media markets, knowledge transmission, and city growth across Europe 1450-1600. The paper construct- s comprehensive firm-level panel data on the number and subjects of book titles printed each year by the 7,000+ printing firms operating in over 300 European cities 1450-1600. Information from historical books is used to identify the dates at which printers died prematurely and management control of their firms passed to widows or heirs. Firms where managers died prematurely experienced large nega- tive shocks to output. However, at the city-level manager deaths were associated with significant increases in (i) entrance and (ii) production by incumbent firms with product line specializations similar to that of the firm losing its manager. On net, manager deaths increased competition and city-level output. The variation in city-level supply induced by heterogeneous manager deaths is used to identify the impact of print media on city-level population growth. Local access to printed merchants' manuals used in business education was particularly associated with growth. New micro data on book prices document the inter-city trade costs that generated local spillovers.