Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries. Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium. Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century shows...

This paper uses city-level data to examine the impact of a first wave of railroad construction in Sweden, between 1855 and 1870, from the 19th century until today. We estimate that railroads accounted for 50% of urban growth, 1855-1870. In cities with access to the railroad network, property...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation...

We describe a model that integrates a multi-regional input-output model of the U.S. (50 states and the District of Columbia) with the national highway network. Interstate commodity shipments are placed on a congestible highway network. Simulations of major choke-point disruptions redirect...

This paper studies the impact of the rapid expansion of the Brazilian road network, which occurred from the 1960s to the 2000s, on the growth and spatial allocation of population and economic activity across the country's municipalities. It addresses the problem of endogeneity in infrastructure...

Zipf’s law is one of the best-known empirical regularities of the city-size distribution. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the...

Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries. Railroad construction incolonialKenyaprovidesanaturalexperimenttostudytheemer- gence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium. Using new data...

This paper analyses the relationship between firms’ multi-factor productivity and the effective employment density of the areas where they operate. Quantifying these agglomeration elasticities is of central importance in the evaluation of the wider economic benefits of transport investments....

Unlike oil and coal, which are compressed forms of energy, renewable energy requires unusually large land areas. This article calculates the consequences of a switch to hydrogen-cell vehicles powered by electricity from wind turbines. It then re-does the calculation for three other green energy...