Railroads and Micro-regional Growth in Prussia
Abstract
We study the e ect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We nd positive short- and long-term e ects of having a station on urban growth for di erent periods during 1840-1871. Causal e ects of (potentially endogenous) railroad access on city growth are identi ed using instrumentalvariable and xed-e ects estimation techniques. Our instrument identi es exogenous variation in railroad access by constructing straight-line corridors between terminal stations. Counterfactual models using pre-railroad growth yield no evidence in support of the hypothesis that railroads appeared as a consequence of a previous growth spurt.Download Info
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Paper provided by Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) in its series CAGE Online Working Paper Series with number 79.Length:
Date of creation: 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cge:warwcg:79
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Web page: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/
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Related research
Keywords: Railroads; Technological Di usion; City Growth; Prussian Economic History;Other versions of this item:
- Erik Hornung, 2012. "Railroads and Micro-regional Growth in Prussia," Ifo Working Paper Series Ifo Working Paper No. 127, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
- O18 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Urban, Rural, Regional, and Transportation Analysis; Housing; Infrastructure
- O33 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change; Research and Development; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
- N73 - Economic History - - Economic History: Transport, International and Domestic Trade, Energy, and Other Services - - - Europe: Pre-1913
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-03-21 (All new papers)
- NEP-GEO-2012-03-21 (Economic Geography)
- NEP-HIS-2012-03-21 (Business, Economic & Financial History)
- NEP-TRE-2012-03-21 (Transport Economics)
- NEP-URE-2012-03-21 (Urban & Real Estate Economics)
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References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Stefan Arent, 2012. "Expectations and Saving Behavior: An Empirical Analysis," Ifo Working Paper Series Ifo Working Paper No. 128, Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
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