Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure
Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure
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DOI：
10.3386/w16487
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发表时间：
2010-10
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
D. Donaldson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
D. Donaldson
交通基础设施项目的好处有多大？如何解释这些好处？为了阐明这些问题，我收集了殖民时期印度的档案数据，并用它来估计印度庞大铁路网的影响。在一般均衡贸易模型的六个预测的指导下，我发现铁路：(1)减少了贸易成本和区域间的价格差距；(2)区域间和国际贸易增长；(3)消除了地方价格对地方生产率冲击的响应性（但增加了这些冲击在地区之间的传导）；(4)提高了实际收入水平（但损害了周边无铁路通达地区）；(5)降低了实际收入的波动性；并且(6)，模型中铁路对福利影响的充分统计数据几乎解释了所有观察到的铁路对实际收入的减少影响。我从一个工具变量规范中发现了类似的结果，从4万多公里批准但从未建造的线路中没有发现虚假影响，并且对铁路的估计影响有严格的限制。这些结果表明，交通基础设施项目可以显著改善福利，这是因为它们允许地区利用贸易收益。
How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? To shed new light on these questions, I collect archival data from colonial India and use it to estimate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by six predictions from a general equilibrium trade model, I find that railroads: (1) decreased trade costs and interregional price gaps; (2) increased interregional and international trade; (3) eliminated the responsiveness of local prices to local productivity shocks (but increased the transmission of these shocks between regions); (4) increased the level of real income (but harmed neighboring regions without railroad access); (5) decreased the volatility of real income; and (6), a sufficient statistic for the effect of railroads on welfare in the model accounts for virtually all of the observed reduced-form impact of railroads on real income. I find similar results from an instrumental variable specification, no spurious effects from over 40,000 km of lines that were approved but never built, and tight bounds on the estimated impact of railroads. These results suggest that transportation infrastructure projects can improve welfare significantly, and do so because they allow regions to exploit gains from trade.