Railroads and Micro-regional Growth in Prussia

Erik Hornung

No 127, ifo Working Paper Series from ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of 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 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 instrumental variable and fixed-effects estimation techniques. Our instrument identifies 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.

JEL-codes: N73 O18 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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