Economic Dynamics of the Early Roman Empire: Insights from Lead Pollution, Coinage, Weather, and War

This repository contains the Stata data and code necessary to
replicate the empirical analysis presented in Oddo, Traverso, and
Verboven (2026). <br>The paper investigates the
relationship between anthropogenic lead pollution recorded in Greenland
ice cores and a set of variables plausibly linked to the economic
dynamics of the Early Roman Empire during the Pax Romana (27 BC – 180
AD). Specifically, the analysis examines whether annual variations in
lead emissions can be systematically explained by summer temperature
anomalies (a proxy for agricultural surplus), Roman coin output (a proxy
for monetary dynamics), and the occurrence of wartime years. The
analysis combines high-resolution paleoclimatic, paleoenvironmental,
archaeological, and historical data at an annual frequency, providing
one of the first systematic investigations of short-term economic
fluctuations in an ancient society.<br>The replication materials
allow users to reproduce all tables and figures reported in both the
main text and the appendix of the paper.<br>