The role of aviation networks for urban development

City officials are continuously working to attract airlines willing to fly to new destinations. The inherent expectation is that a more extensive aviation network stimulates economic growth. This paper investigates empirically the causal implication of this hypothesis. Using data on nonstop flights by origin and destination over the period 1984–2013, we propose a new measure for a metropolitan area's connectivity to the national aviation network. We then use this measure to investigate its contribution to local economic development, as captured by the growth in population, in total employment, in per‐capita income, and new firm entry. To ensure causality, we use instrumental variable methods that exploit geography and destination airports growth as a way to capture the exogenous variation in the likelihood to add new travel routes. Our results suggest that a metropolitan area's air connectivity, resulting from an expansive local aviation network, has a positive effect on population, on employment and on the number of businesses established in that location.