We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

This paper answers the following two questions: 1) In the data, can we find a dilution effect of population growth also on per-capita human capital investment? If yes, 2) how can we use this fact to explain theoretically the existence of a differential impact of population change on economic...

We analyze the effects of declining population growth on automation. A simple theoretical model of capital accumulation predicts that countries with lower population growth introduce automation technologies earlier. We test the theoretical prediction on panel data for 60 countries over the time...

We analyze the effects of declining population growth on the adoption of automation technology. A standard theoretical framework of the accumulation of traditional physical capital and of automation capital predicts that countries with a lower population growth rate are the ones that innovate...