In the literature, there are few studies on the impacts of the railroad construction in the Middle Eastern countries as well mixed findings. Using the data on the population of judicial districts in the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1914, we examine the relationship between railroad access and economic growth in local economies. Our empirical results show the size expansion in the affected areas of railroad access. This suggests the presence of positive impact of railroads on economic growth through increasing employment opportunities and fertility rates. To deal with endogeneity problems, we use instrumental variable (IV) strategy. Our 2SLS results also indicate that the causality runs from access to railroads to population growth. The paper contributes to the previous empirical literature by providing evidence for an agricultural society with limited factor mobility due to the lack of transportation infrastructure.
The lack of well-documented information in the historical literature on the relationship between war-related expectations and their effects on the bond market in the Ottoman Empire motivates this paper's three contributions. First, this paper is the first empirical study to investigate the break points in the volatility of Ottoman bond prices from a historical point of view. Second, we use the econometric technique developed by Inclan and Tiao (1994) to identify the structural breaks. Last, we use a manually collected dataset from the daily newspapers of the time on daily Ottoman bond prices from 1910 to 1914. Subsequently, we identify five structural break dates, each of them corresponding to important warrelated events. When we investigate the commentaries in the Ottoman newspapers, we see that the outbreak of several wars might not have been a surprise for investors in the Ottoman Empire, as reflected by government bond prices.
In the literature, there are few studies on the impacts of the railroad construction in the Middle Eastern countries as well mixed findings. Using the data on the population of judicial districts in the Ottoman Empire between 1893 and 1914, we examine the relationship between railroad access and economic growth in local economies. Our empirical results show the size expansion in the affected areas of railroad access. This suggests the presence of positive impact of railroads on economic growth through increasing employment opportunities and fertility rates. To deal with endogeneity problems, we use instrumental variable (IV) strategy. Our 2SLS results also indicate that the causality runs from access to railroads to population growth. The paper contributes to the previous empirical literature by providing evidence for an agricultural society with limited factor mobility due to the lack of transportation infrastructure.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.