TY  - JOUR
AU  - Campante,Filipe
AU  - Glaeser,Edward L.
TI  - Yet Another Tale of Two Cities: Buenos Aires and Chicago
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15104
PY  - 2009
Y2  - June 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15104
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15104.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Filipe Campante
Harvard University
John F. Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
E-Mail: filipe_campante@harvard.edu

Edward L. Glaeser
Department of Economics
315A Littauer Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-0575
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu
AB  - Buenos Aires and Chicago grew during the nineteenth century for remarkably similar reasons.  Both cities were conduits for moving meat and grain from fertile hinterlands to eastern markets.  However, despite their initial similarities, Chicago was vastly more prosperous for most of the 20th century.  Can the differences between the cities after 1930 be explained by differences in the cities before that date?  We highlight four major differences between Buenos Aires and Chicago in 1914.  Chicago was slightly richer, and significantly better educated.  Chicago was more industrially developed, with about 2.25 times more capital per worker.  Finally, Chicago’s political situation was far more stable and it wasn’t a political capital.   Human capital seems to explain the lion’s share of the divergent path of the two cities and their countries, both because of its direct effect and because of the connection between education and political instability.
ER  -