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Cited by 892

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 18 of the 18 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Roads to Prosperity? Assessing the Link Between Public Capital and Productivity

Fernald, John G·1999·American Economic Review
DOI 10.1257/aer.89.3.619
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Abstract

Does the positive correlation between infrastructure and productivity reflect causation? If so, in which direction? I find that when growth in roads (the largest component of infrastructure) changes, productivity growth changes disproportionately in U.S. industries with more vehicles. That vehicle-intensive industries benefit more from road-building suggests that roads are productive. At the margin, however, road investments do not appear unusually productive. Intuitively, the interstate system was highly productive, but a second one would not be. Road-building thus explains much of the productivity slowdown through a one-time, unrepeatable productivity boost in the 1950's and 1960's. (JEL E62, O47, R53)

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Metadata

Authors
Fernald, J. G.
Venue
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Published
1999-06-01
Volume
89
Issue
3
Pages
619-638
ISSN
0002-8282 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1257/aer.89.3.619
OpenAlex
W1976269319
Cited by
892
References
18
FWCI
15.69
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Roads to Prosperity? Assessing the Link Between Public Capital and Productivity. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1257/aer.89.3.619
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Fernald, J. G. (1999). Roads to Prosperity? Assessing the Link Between Public Capital and Productivity. American Economic Review. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.89.3.619

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.