The Messina-Reggio Calabria Earthquake (1908) was one of the most devastating natural disasters in modern European history. It occurred when overseas mass emigration from southern Italy was at its peak and international borders were open, making emigration a readily available option for relief. We find that the earthquake had no large positive impact on emigration on average. There were, however, heterogeneous responses, with a more positive effect where agricultural day laborers comprised a larger share of the labor force, suggesting that attachment to the land limited an emigration response.

This paper examines the patterns of technology transfer from Britain to France during the early phases of industrializing using a dataset comprising all patents granted in France in the period 1791–1844. Exploiting the peculiarities of French legislation, we construct an array of patent quality indicators and investigate their determinants. We find that patents filed by British inventors or French inventors with personal connections to British inventors were of relatively higher quality. Overall, our results show that the French innovation system was capable of attracting and effectively absorbing key technologies from Britain.