Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure

American Economic Review - Tập 108 Số 4-5 - Trang 899-934 - 2018
Dave Donaldson1
1MIT Department of Economics, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142, and NBER (email: )

Tóm tắt

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? This paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four results from a general equilibrium trade model, I find that railroads: (1) decreased trade costs and interregional price gaps; (2) increased interregional and international trade; (3) increased real income levels; and (4) that a sufficient statistic for the effect of railroads on welfare in the model accounts well for the observed reduced-form impact of railroads on real income in the data. (JEL H54, L92, N75, O22, R12, R42)

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Thông tin xuất bản

American Economic Review

Tập 108 Số 4-5

899-934

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