We use the expansion of the high-speed rail network in Germany as a natural experiment to examine the causal effect of reductions in commuting time between regions on the commuting decisions of workers and their choices regarding where to live and where to work. We exploit three key features in...

The entry of High-Speed Railways (HSR) represents a disruptive competition to airlines, particularly for short- to medium-distance journeys. Utilizing a unique dataset that contains the details of all flights departing from Beijing to 113 domestic destinations in China since January 2009, we...

High skilled workers gain from face to face interactions. If the skilled can move at higher speeds, then knowledge diffusion and idea spillovers are likely to reach greater distances. This paper uses the construction of China's high speed rail (HSR) network as a natural experiment to test this...

The social costs of pollution and climate change hinge critically on humans' ability to adapt. Based on transaction records from the world's largest payment network, this research compiles daily travel flows and documents that China's rapid expansion of high-speed railways (HSR) facilitates the...

How do political preferences shape transportation policy? We study this question in the context of California's High-Speed Rail (CHSR). Combining geographic data on votes in a referendum on the CHSR with a model of its expected economic benefits, we estimate the weight of economic and...

Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...