Railways and cities in India

James Fenske, Namrata Kala and Jinlin Wei
Additional contact information
Namrata Kala: SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Jinlin Wei: University of Warwick

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Using a new dataset on city populations in colonial India, we show that the railroad network increased city size in the period 1881 to 1931. Our baseline estimation approach includes fixed effects for city and year, and we construct instrumental variables for railroad proximity based on distance from a least cost path spanning cities that existed prior to the start of railroad construction. Cities that increased market access due to the railroad grew, particularly those cities that were initially small and isolated.

Keywords: JEL; Classification: (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-tre
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp559.2021.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Railways and cities in India (2023)
Working Paper: Railways and cities in India (2021)
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:cge:wacage:559

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().