Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, this paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four predictions from a general...

The importance of increments to an existing highway system depends upon their contributions to the accessibility provided by the existing network. Nearly 40 years ago, Mohring [1965] suggested this logic for planning optimal highway investment programs. He argued it could be implemented by...

We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) in US cities. We find that VKT increases proportionately to highways and identify three important sources for this extra VKT: an increase in driving by current residents; an increase in...

There is a long-standing debate over whether new roads unavoidably lead to environmental damage, especially forest loss, but causal identification has been elusive. Using multiple causal identification strategies, this paper studies the construction of new rural roads to over 100,000 villages...

China has used two main spatial policies to shape its geographic patterns of development: restricted labor mobility through the Hukou residential registration system and massive infrastructure investment, notably a 96,000 kilometer national expressway network. This paper develops a structural...

This paper proposes a methodology to prioritize interventions in Peru's road network. A network model is built, linking the country's economic and population centers through indicative corridors, which are defined as the least-cost routes to connect origins to destinations. The network's...

This paper studies the regional treatment effects of infrastructure projects on employment and transport volumes by combining the quantitative econometric method with qualitative case studies. The quantitative method that we use is synthetic control, which allows us to analyze the causal effects...

The significance of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of the People's Republic of China (PRC) for Europe is increasing. The diplomatic initiative "16+1," comprising 11 Central and East European EU member states and five Western Balkan economies, expanded to a "17+1" format in April 2019, when...

This research study aimed to assesses the impact of infrastructure based on the evaluation of infrastructure provision's effect on public finance, presenting the case of Kutaisi International Airport in Georgia. In the case, we assessed the impact of the airport on the public finances of the...