Early twentieth century American exceptionalism on wheels: the role of rapid automobile adoption in economic development

Dong Cheng and Alyssa Trebino ()
Additional contact information
Alyssa Trebino: Willis Towers Watson

Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences, 2021, vol. 14, issue 2, No 7, 221 pages

Abstract: Abstract We investigate the contribution of automobile adoption to state-level real income in the United States using hand-collected historical data of the early twentieth century when the adoption was remarkably rapid. To achieve identification, we construct a Bartik-type instrumental variable for automobile adoption. We find an elasticity of income with respect to automobile adoption between 0.5 and 1. Furthermore, we reveal that the elasticity is significantly larger in high-income and automobile producing states.

Keywords: Automobile; Technology adoption; Income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N72 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12076-021-00273-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:lsprsc:v:14:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s12076-021-00273-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/12076

DOI: 10.1007/s12076-021-00273-6

Access Statistics for this article

Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences is currently edited by Henk Folmer and Amitrajeet A. Batabyal

More articles in Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().