Dave Donaldson

TL;DR: In this article, the authors use historical data from colonial India to estimate the impact of India's vast railroad network and find that railroads: (1) decreased trade costs and inter-regional price gaps; (2) increased interregional and international trade; (3) eliminated the responsiveness of local prices to local productivity shocks (but increased the transmission of these shocks between regions); (4) increased the level of real income (but harmed neighboring regions without railroad access); (5) decreased the volatility of real incomes; and (6), a sufficient statistic for the effect

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the historical impact of railroads on the American economy and found that changes in market access are capitalized in agricultural land values with an estimated elasticity of 1.5.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the historical impact of railroads on the American economy and found that the total impact on each county is captured by changes in that county's "market access," a reduced-form expression derived from general equilibrium trade theory.

TL;DR: The authors introduce economists to the science of remotely sensed data, and give a flavor of how this new source of data has been used by economists so far and what might be done in the future.

TL;DR: This article used archival data from colonial India to investigate the impact of India's vast railroad network and found that railroads: (1) decreased trade costs and inter-regional 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 railroad on real income in the data.