Railroads and Growth in Prussia

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may www.econstor.eu Railroads and Growth in Prussia * AbstractWe study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short-and long-term effects of having a station on urban growth for different periods during 1840-1871. Causal effects of (potentially endogenous) railroad access on city growth are identified using propensity score matching, instrumental variables, and fixed-effects estimation techniques. Our instrument identifies exogenous variation in railroad access by constructing straight-line corridors between nodes. Counterfactual models using pre-railroad growth yield no evidence to support the hypothesis that railroads appeared as a consequence of a previous growth spurt.JEL Classification: O18, O33, N73

Landownership concentration and the expansion of education

“…Unity if a county was crossed by at least one railroad line in 1849 (Hornung, 2012). Share of knight estates (Rittergüter ) over the total number of holdings (Meitzen, 1868).…”

Illuminating the World Cup effect: Night lights evidence from South Africa

“…Apart from being directly linked to the research on mega events, our study also strongly relates to the literature analyzing economic effects of transport infrastructure, as a large part of the World Cup preparations involved improvement of the transportation system. There is evidence that investments in transport infrastructure have long‐lasting, positive effects on economic growth by creating a market access advantage to those places that, for example, are connected to a railroad or were connected earlier (Berger & Enflo, ; Cogneau & Moradi, ; Donaldson, ; Donaldson & Hornbeck, ; Hornung, ; Jedwab, Kerby, & Moradi, ). Furthermore, other studies show the importance of public infrastructure for the decision of firms to locate in a particular country or region (Holl, ; Martin & Rogers, ) and for urban growth in (Sub‐Saharan) Africa (Storeygard, ).…”

Fast track to growth? Railway access, population growth and local displacement in 19th century Switzerland

“…Combining GIS-tools and econometric methods, Atack et al (2010) revisit Fishlow's analysis for counties in the American Midwest from 1850 to 1860 and find that railway access increased population density by about 3 percentage points within the decade studied. More recent studies find that railways substantially accelerated urban growth, as documented for Prussia (Hornung, 2015), Sweden (Berger and Enflo, 2017), and Africa (Jedwabi and Moradi, 2016). 2 We complement this literature by providing comprehensive evidence on the consequences of railway expansion in a mostly rural setup.…”