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Cited by 579

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure

Open access
Donaldson, Dave·2010·National Bureau of Economic Research
DOI 10.3386/w16487
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Abstract

How large are the benefits of transportation infrastructure projects, and what explains these benefits?To shed new light on these questions, this paper uses archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network.Guided by four 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) increased real income levels; and (4), that a sufficient statistic for the effect of railroads on welfare in the model (an effect that is purely due to newly exploited gains from trade) accounts for virtually all of the observed reduced-form impact of railroads on real income in the data.I find no spurious effects from over 40,000 km of lines that were approved but -for four different reasons -were never built.

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Metadata

Authors
Donaldson, D.
Venue
National Bureau of Economic Research
Publisher
National Bureau of Economic Research
Published
2010-10
DOI
10.3386/w16487
OpenAlex
W1733763653
Cited by
579
References
40
Type
report
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3386/w16487
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Donaldson, D. (2010). Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w16487

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