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SUMMARY: Railroads and inventive activities: new evidence from Italy\, 185
 5-1914 - Alessandro Nuvolari (Pisa)
DTSTART:20231116T171500Z
DTEND:20231116T184500Z
UID:TALK207004@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:16750
DESCRIPTION:Transport infrastructures are a driving force of the diffusion
  of knowledge and inventive activities. Since the pioneering study of Soko
 loff (1988)\, which established a link between inventive activities and th
 e proximity to navigable waterways in the United States\, there has been a
  stream of research studying the impact of transport infrastructures on th
 e rate and direction of inventive activity in different historical context
 s (e.g.\, Andersson\, Berger\, and Prawitz 2021\; Tsiachtsiras 2023). In I
 taly\, the railroad expansion coincided with the first steps of the indust
 rialization process. This makes Italy a relevant case-study to historicall
 y assess the role of the development of transport systems in latecomer ind
 ustrializing countries. \n\nThis paper analyses the impact of railroad exp
 ansion on municipal-level measures of innovation in Italy by using two new
  geo-localized datasets. The first comprises all patents registered in Ita
 ly by Italian residents from 1855 to 1914\, while the second provides a GI
 S database indicating the year of construction of all Italian railroad sto
 ps. In our main exercise\, we use a staggered difference-in-differences em
 pirical approach (Callaway and Sant’Anna 2021). \n\nWe find that railroa
 ds impacted on the intensity and diffusion of innovation mostly during the
  first wave of railway construction (“Destra Storica”) which was mostl
 y shaped by political and military goals and nation-building concerns (abo
 ut 1861-1880). In contrast\, the second wave (“Sinistra Storica”) of r
 ailway construction (1879-1896) which was supposedly driven by more genuin
 e economic factors\, seems to have a more limited impact.  \n
LOCATION:Room 6\, Faculty of History
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