Roads to innovation: evidence from Italy

Anna Bottasso, Maurizio Conti, Simone Robbiano and Marta Santagata

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this study we leverage on the ancient Roman roads network as a source of exogenous variation in order to identify the causal effect of the modern highways network on innovation using Italian NUTS-3 regional data. Our results suggest that a 10 percent increase in the highways stock in a region causes an increase in the number of patents of about 2-3 percent over a five years period. We document that this positive effect on innovation might in part be explained by a reduction in travel costs that foster collaborations between inventors living in different regions. We also find that the innovation enhancing effect of highways declines over time, possibly because of the introduction of ICT, or the increasing congestion over the Italian network. Finally, we find also evidence of important heterogeneous treatment effects associated to region population density and we cannot rule out the existence of negative spillovers across regions, suggesting possible reorganization of innovative activity across space.

Keywords: transport infrastructure; innovation; regional growth; policy evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L91 O33 O47 R11 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-ict, nep-ino, nep-sbm, nep-tid, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/104735/1/MPRA_paper_104735.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Roads to innovation: Evidence from Italy (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:104735

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().