Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries.  Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium.  Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century...

Interpreting the role of expanding transport in overall production growth in the nineteenth century is still hampered by our lack of understanding of how much and when ocean shipping costs began to fall. This paper exploits new output and freight rate data for one of the world`s largest merchant...

When consumers are forward-looking with respect to their demand for a habit-forming good, traditional measures of price elasticity are misleading.  In particular, such measures will underestimate sensitivity to long-run shifts - and therefore underestimate the potential effect of policy...