LSE Business Review blog:
The trade impact of the transatlantic telegraph
20 March 2018
The telegraph was the Victorian equivalent of today’s ‘big data’, helping firms to forecast future demand, writes Claudia Steinwender. How do exporters gather information about overseas markets and forecast consumer demand for their products? What do they do if technology suddenly makes it possible to get access to better and more timely information? And what is the overall impact on prices, market integration and trade flows? These are challenging questions in the modern world of the internet and ‘big data’, where the vast amount of new information that firms can collect on consumers could have a significant impact on global economic interactions. In a recent study, I have looked back to Victorian times to see what can be learned from the introduction of the transatlantic telegraph cable that connected Europe and North America.
Related publications
‘Real Effects of Information Frictions: When the States and the Kingdom Became United’, Claudia Steinwender, American Economic Review, Vol. 108, No. 3, March 2018
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150681
doi: 10.1257/aer.20150681