Estimating the Income Eect of Railways

We estimate the eects of railway placement on growth rates and levels of per capita income for 230 regions from 12 European countries between 1870 and 1910. We address endogenous railway placement by exploiting historical road data, which tend to be correlated with current railway data. Our results show that regional railway density has a large positive causal eect on both growth and levels of per capita income. We interpret this positive eect