College Openings and Local Economic Development

Public Infrastructure and Regional Resilience: Evidence from the 1918 Spanish Flu in Germany

“…The first hypothesis is straightforward as hospital treatment should reduce the probability of dying from influenza (Hobday and Cason, 2009). For the second hypothesis, we argue that shocks reveal hidden public infrastructure 1 Previous studies have also examined effects on development of specific forms of infrastructure such as roads (Baum-Snow et al, 2020;Marein, 2022), railroads (Heblich et al, 2020), airports (Czernich et al, 2011;Doerr et al, 2020), broadband internet (Czernich et al, 2011;Doerr et al, 2020), or educational institutions (Freier et al, 2021;Berlingieri et al, 2022). Healthcare infrastructure has not been a focus so far.…”