Railroads and Micro-regional Growth in Prussia

Erik Hornung

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

Abstract: We study the e ect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We nd positive short- and long-term e ects of having a station on urban growth for di erent periods during 1840-1871. Causal e ects of (potentially endogenous) railroad access on city growth are identi ed using instrumentalvariable and xed-e ects estimation techniques. Our instrument identi es exogenous variation in railroad access by constructing straight-line corridors between terminal stations. Counterfactual models using pre-railroad growth yield no evidence in support of the hypothesis that railroads appeared as a consequence of a previous growth spurt.

Keywords: Railroads; Technological Di usion; City Growth; Prussian Economic History (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Working Paper: Railroads and Micro-regional Growth in Prussia (2012)
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