Railroad Development and Land Value

Chad Coffman and Mary Eschelbach Gregson

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 1998, vol. 16, issue 2, 204 pages

Abstract: Land owners in the rural Midwest experienced significant capital gains during the late 1840s and early 1850s. A primary catalyst of increasing land values was the construction of new railroads. Land in close proximity to new railroads became more valuable because of decreased transportation costs. We use a straightforward model of land price determination to estimate the impact on land values of distance from the railroad. The estimates allow us to infer a lower bound for capital gains attributable to the construction of railroads in Knox County, Illinois, during the 1850s. Knox County landowners reaped capital gains of more than $270,000--9 percent of the value of land. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0895-5638/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:jrefec:v:16:y:1998:i:2:p:191-204

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11146/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics is currently edited by Steven R. Grenadier, James B. Kau and C.F. Sirmans

More articles in The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().