Roads and Innovation

Ajay Agrawal, Alberto Galasso and Alexander Oettl
Additional contact information
Alberto Galasso: University of Toronto and NBER

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2017, vol. 99, issue 3, 417-434

Abstract: We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region's stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge flows, increasing the likelihood that innovators access knowledge inputs from local but more distant neighbors. Thus, transportation infrastructure may spur regional growth above and beyond the more commonly discussed agglomeration economies predicated on an inflow of new workers.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (107)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/REST_a_00619 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Roads and Innovation (2014)
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:tpr:restat:v:99:y:2017:i:3:p:417-434

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().