Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure

I am extremely grateful to Timothy Besley, Robin Burgess and Stephen Redding for their encouragement and support throughout this project. My thesis examiners, Richard Blundell and Chang-Tai Hsieh, and discussants, Costas Arkolakis and Samuel Kortum, provided detailed and valuable advice, and seminar audiences at Berkeley, BU, Brown, the CEPR (Development Economics Conference), Chicago, CIFAR, the Econometric Society European Winter Meetings, Harvard, the Harvard-Hitotsubashi-Warwick Economic History Conference, IMF, LSE, MIT, Minneapolis Federal Reserve (Applied Micro Workshop), NBER Summer Institute (ITI), Northwestern, Nottingham, NYU, Oxford, Penn, Penn State, Philadelphia Federal Reserve, Princeton, Stanford, Toronto, Toulouse, UCL, UCLA, Warwick, Wharton, World Bank, and Yale made thoughtful comments that improved this work. I am also grateful to Erasmus Ermgassen, Rashmi Harimohan and Sritha Reddy for their help with the data; to the British Academy, the Nuffield Foundation, the Royal Economic Society, and STICERD for funding the data collection; and to the Bagri Fellowship and the DFID Program on Improving Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.