Will politics lead to over-building or under-building of transportation projects? In this paper, we develop a model of infrastructure policy in which politicians overdo things that have hidden costs and underperform tasks whose costs voters readily perceive. Consequently, national funding of...

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...

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the...

We develop a general equilibrium geographic framework to characterize the welfare effect of transportation infrastructure investments. We tackle three distinct but conflating challenges: First, we offer an analytical characterization of the routing problem and, in particular, how infrastructure...

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 use data from Reserve Bank of India to study the impact of India's Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on finance-dependent activity. Loan volumes increase by 20-30% in districts along GQ and are stronger in industries more dependent upon external finance. Loan growth begins with...

Many transportation policies indirectly affect vehicle travel and resulting externalities by inducing changes in vehicle scrappage rates. We leverage the staggered removal of state-level safety inspection programs across the United States within an instrumental variables (IV) framework to...

I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural US, 1820-1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort's county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard deviation increase in...