Nearly a third of the world's rural population does not live near a paved road, and it is widely
believed that this limits their access to economic opportunities. Using a natural experiment …

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we
match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in 19th-century Prussia to …

We study the consequences of poverty-alleviation programs for environmental degradation.
We exploit the community-level eligibility discontinuity for a conditional cash transfer …

We find that high‐speed railway connection in China has led to a reduction in GDP per
capita for connected peripheral prefectures. We use the least‐cost path‐spanning tree …

The literature on commodity market integration has boomed in the last 15 years, and a sort
of consensus is slowly emerging, at least with regard to trends in the last two centuries. This …

When did Germany become economically integrated? Based on a large new data set on
trade flows within and across the borders of Germany, I explore the geography of trade costs …

W. Arthur Lewis argued that a new international economic order emerged between 1870
and 1913, and that global terms of trade forces produced rising primary product …

This article argues that market integration should be measured as σ-convergence over the
largest possible sample of markets. Its focus is the European market for wheat, rye and …

This study contributes to a revised picture of nineteenth-century bilateralism. Employing a
new disaggregated data set, it argues that bilateral treaties did not implement general free …

The Zollverein was arguably the most important free trade agreement of the nineteenth
century. Although 1834 is the official date of the Zollverein's establishment, member states …