This paper explores the impact of new universities established in the USA between 1931 and 1980 on population density, GDP and market size measured from 1930 to 2010. The analysis is based on differences in differences on counties selected through propensity score matching, as well as an instrumental variable approach. The evidence suggests that counties hosting a university for the first time grew by between 1% and 3% annually on top of the general trends of population density and GDP growth, and that this effect expanded to neighboring counties. Controlling for research intensity and interstate road infrastructure shows that the potential gains from these new universities were severely constrained by the ease of access, which eventually resulted in higher congestion costs. These results point to a situation where new universities create spillover effects that eventually fade away if not accompanied by additional investments.

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Town foundations have been at the core of urban planning since the onset of civilization. This paper describes the long-run impact of an urbanization place-based policy that was considered a failure by contemporary policymakers. We test the impact of founded towns using a series of town foundations that took place between 1570 and 1810, when the Swedish Crown conferred monopoly market rights to trade upon 31 previously rural ordinary parishes. We show that towns were founded in locations with little natural potential, evident in their limited impact on agricultural surplus in the surrounding hinterlands. However, the new foundations drove extensive growth in terms of population and created positive spillover effects up to 40-50 km around the settlements. Still, the founded towns remained extraordinarily small by the end of the policy period. It was not until the Industrial Revolution that these towns began to thrive. We suggest that trading rights and sunk investments initially served to coordinate expectations about future growth. Once the towns started to grow, agglomeration effects generated persistence in the long term.

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This paper examines the relationship between the coming of the railroads, the expansion of primary education, and the introduction of national school curricula. Using fine-grained data on local education outcomes in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the paper tests the idea that the development of the railroad network enabled national school inspectors to monitor remote schools more effectively. In localities to which school inspectors could travel by rail, a larger share of children attended permanent public schools and took classes in nation-building subjects such as geography and history. By contrast, the parochial interests of local and religious authorities continued to dominate in remote areas school inspectors could not reach by train. The paper argues for a causal interpretation of these findings, which are robust for the share of children in permanent schools and suggestive for the content of the curriculum. The paper therefore concludes that the railroad, the defining innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, mattered directly for the state's ability to implement public policies.