IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-35583-7_30.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Railroads

In: Handbook of Cliometrics

Author

Listed:
  • Jeremy Atack

    (Vanderbilt University
    NBER)

Abstract

From the outset, railroads excited the public’s imagination, leading to extravagant claims regarding their contribution to economic growth and development that only grew with time. Skepticism about these claims eventually led to their debunking, most notably by Robert Fogel whose seminal work was also central to the emergence of cliometrics and inspired the first major controversy in the discipline. The flood of work that followed paints a more nuanced picture, generally assigning a larger growth and development role to the railroad than Fogel, but one far short of the hyperbole of past generations. Railroads were important to the economy and transformative in their effect but not decisive. By lowering transport costs – especially after adjusting for quality – they not only diverted trade but also created new opportunities in part by generating positive externalities that promoted scale and agglomeration economies with network spillovers continent-wide.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeremy Atack, 2024. "Railroads," Springer Books, in: Claude Diebolt & Michael Haupert (ed.), Handbook of Cliometrics, edition 3, pages 2329-2357, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-35583-7_30
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-35583-7_30
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-35583-7_30. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.