Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/73792 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
ifo Working Paper No. 127
Publisher: 
ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, Munich
Abstract: 
We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques,we match triennial population data for roughly 1000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussiato georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- andlong-term effects of having a station on urban growth for different periods during1840–1871. Causal effects of (potentially endogenous) railroad access on city growthare identified using instrumental variable and fixed-effects estimation techniques. Ourinstrument identifies exogenous variation in railroad access by constructing straight-linecorridors between terminal stations. Counterfactual models using pre-railroad growthyield no evidence in support of the hypothesis that railroads appeared as a consequenceof a previous growth spurt.
Subjects: 
Railroads
technological diffusion
economic growth
population growth
JEL: 
O18
O33
N73
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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