Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility: The Impact of Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Industrializing Berlin

Gabriel Ahlfeldt and Nicolai Wendland

No 23, Working Papers from Chair for Economic Policy, University of Hamburg

Abstract: As the first to use an archival data set on historical land values of Berlin, Germany, from 1890 to 1936, we exploit exogenous variation in transport technology in order to test the validity of the monocentric city model. Endogenously determining the CBD, we conduct cross-section and timedifference analysis and model the land gradient in terms of straight-line distance and travel times. A counterfactual scenario indicates that a large proportion of urban decentralization is attributable to improvements in transport infrastructure. Controlling for spatial dependency, results suggest that the monocentric model fitted the city structure until the mid 20th century.

Keywords: Transport Innovations; Land Values; Location Productivity; Economic History (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N7 N9 O12 R33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2008-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published in Hamburg Contemporary Economic Discussions, Issue 23, 2008

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http://www.hced.uni-hamburg.de/WorkingPapers/023.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility: The Impact of Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Industrializing Berlin (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hce:wpaper:023

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