Abstract
AbstractIn this study, we leverage on the ancient Roman roads network as a source of exogenous variation to identify the causal effect of the modern highways network on innovative performance of Italian NUTS‐3 regions. Empirical findings suggest that a 10% increase in the highways stock in a region generates an increase in the number of patents of about 3%–4%, over a 5‐year period. Further analysis suggests that our findings can in part be explained by a reduction in travel costs that fosters collaborations among inventors living in different regions and by an increase in the degree of centrality in the regional innovation network associated to denser highways networks. Finally, we find that the innovation‐enhancing effect of highways declines over time, possibly because of the introduction of information and communication technology, or the increasing congestion on the Italian network.
Highlights
The role of transport infrastructure investments in fostering growth has been extensively studied in the economics and regional science literature
Following Agrawal et al (2017) we estimate our model for the year 1988, which precedes the large diffusion of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and we let regional innovation performance depend on the motorways stock lagged five years
In this work we assess the impact of motorways endowment on regional innovative performance
Summary
The role of transport infrastructure investments in fostering growth has been extensively studied in the economics and regional science literature. Conditioning on a set of geographic and inventor control variables, estimates suggest that an increase of 10% in the length of the motorways network leads to an increase of about 2-3% in regional innovation as measured by forward citation weighted sum of patents.. In contrast to Agrawal et al (2017), there is no evidence in favour of significant heterogeneous effects in sectors characterised by a different level of technological turnover This result might be related to the low presence of firms characterized by high tech-. In some empirical specifications we find mild evidence of displacement effects Such result is in line with the hypothesis of a spatial reorganization process of economic activity taking place, so that the increase of innovative activity in one region takes place, at least in part, at the expense of nearby ones (Redding and Turner, 2015).
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