Rails of Progress? Exploring the nexus between railroad access and innovation in Italy (19th-20th centuries)

This paper provides new evidence on the nexus between railroads and inventive activities in Italy in the period 1861–1936. We develop two new georeferenced datasets on railroad stations and patents covering about 8,000 municipalities. By adopting a staggered difference in differences identification strategy, we show that the impact of railroad construction on innovation is noticeable for the first wave of construction of the period of the Destra storica (1861–1878), when the network was expanded following a state building strategy. However, these effects became noticeable only after two decades and concern mostly independent inventors and low-quality patents. Finally, we show that railroad access fostered innovation, particularly in locations with more advanced pre-existing capabilities.