The DOI matches its Crossref record; 86 of the 86 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure
Open accessAbstract
How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits? This paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network. Guided by four results 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) increased real income levels; and (4) that a sufficient statistic for the effect of railroads on welfare in the model accounts well for the observed reduced-form impact of railroads on real income in the data. (JEL H54, L92, N75, O22, R12, R42)
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications.
Smith, D. K., Ahuja, R. K., Magnanti, T. L., & Orlin, J. B. (1994) · The Journal of the Operational Research Society · doi:10.2307/2583863 · Cited by 8,034
Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle
Anderson, J. E., & van Wincoop, E. (2003) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/000282803321455214 · Cited by 7,566
Is public expenditure productive?
Aschauer, D. A. (1989) · Journal of Monetary Economics · doi:10.1016/0304-3932(89)90047-0 · Cited by 5,431
Frankel, J. A., & Romer, D. (1999) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.89.3.379 · Cited by 5,384
A two-dimensional interpolation function for irregularly-spaced data
Shepard, D. (1968) · Proceedings of the 1968 23rd ACM national conference on - · doi:10.1145/800186.810616 · Cited by 5,079
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.
C., M., & Sen, A. (1982) · Population and Development Review · doi:10.2307/1973011 · Cited by 4,906
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
Douglass, E. P., & Chandler, A. D. (1978) · The American Historical Review · doi:10.2307/1862020 · Cited by 4,538
Technology, Geography, and Trade
Eaton, J., & Kortum, S. (2002) · Econometrica · doi:10.1111/1468-0262.00352 · Cited by 4,485
Scale Economies, Product Differentiation, and the Pattern of Trade
(1990) · Rethinking International Trade · doi:10.7551/mitpress/5933.003.0005 · Cited by 4,464
A Survey of Weak Instruments and Weak Identification in Generalized Method of Moments
Stock, J. H., Wright, J. H., & Yogo, M. (2002) · Journal of Business & Economic Statistics · doi:10.1198/073500102288618658 · Cited by 4,274
Cited by
Estimates of the Trade and Welfare Effects of NAFTA
Caliendo, L., & Parro, F. (2015) · The Review of Economic Studies · doi:10.1093/restud/rdu035 · Cited by 1,518
Railroads and American Economic Growth: A “Market Access” Approach *
Donaldson, D., & Hornbeck, R. (2016) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjw002 · Cited by 1,238
Self-citationFajgelbaum, P. D., Goldberg, P. K., Kennedy, P. J., & Khandelwal, A. K. (2020) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjz036 · Cited by 1,030
Difference-in-Differences Estimators of Intertemporal Treatment Effects
de Chaisemartin, C., & D’Haultfœuille, X. (2026) · Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/rest_a_01414 · Cited by 740
Transportation Costs and the Spatial Organization of Economic Activity
(2015) · Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics · doi:10.1016/b978-0-444-59531-7.00020-x · Cited by 478
Metadata
- Authors
- Donaldson, D.
- Venue
- American Economic Review
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Published
- 2018-04-01
- Volume
- 108
- Issue
- 4-5
- Pages
- 899-934
- ISSN
- 0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3021822145
- Cited by
- 1,634
- References
- 86
- FWCI
- 280.04
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/aer.20101199
- The paper
- Donaldson, D. (2018). Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure. American Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20101199
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.