Our purpose in this paper is to examine how one might evaluate and measure the contribution of public infrastructure capital on private sector output and productivity growth in Sweden. We do this by specifying and implementing empirically a number of alternative econometric models, using annual...

India, seeking to reduce electricity shortages, set up a new power market, in which transmission constraints sharply limit trade between regions. I use confidential bidding data to estimate the costs of power supply and simulate market outcomes with more transmission capacity. I find that the...

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...

Several explanations can be offered for the unbalanced growth of U.S. regional manufacturing industries in the decades after World War II. The convergence hypothesis suggests that the success of the South in catching up to the Northeast and Midwest should be understood by analogy with the...

The impact of public infrastructure investment on the productive performance of firms has been an important focus of the recent literature on productivity growth. The size of this impact has important implications for policymakers' decisions to invest in public capital, and productivity...

While much economic policy presumes that more information infrastructure yields higher economic returns, little empirical work measures the magnitudes of these returns. We examine investment by local exchange telephone companies in fiber optic cable, ISDN lines and signal seven software,...

Researchers, commentators, and politicians have devoted steadily more attention to infrastructure in response to claims that inadequate accumulation of public capital has contributed to substandard U.S. economic growth. Despite this, the link between infrastructure and productivity growth...

Is public sector infrastructure a key determinant of productivity? Traditional, project-based analyses of benefits and costs typically do not find large rates of return. Proponents of infrastructure spending instead point to regression-based analyses of the links between private productivity and...

We investigate the impact of U.S. bombing on later economic development in Vietnam. The Vietnam War featured the most intense bombing campaign in military history and had massive humanitarian costs. We use a unique U.S. military dataset containing bombing intensity at the district level (N=584)....

This paper summarizes economic research on investment in public infrastructure and introduces the findings of several new studies on this topic. It begins with a review of several potential justifications for the public sector’s involvement in building, financing, and operating infrastructure,...