Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility: The Impact of Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Industrializing Berlin

KOF Working Paper No. 208

32 Pages Posted: 23 Oct 2008

See all articles by Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Geography and Environment

Nicolai Wendland

Touro University

Date Written: October 2008

Abstract

As the first to use an archival data set on historical land values of Berlin, Germany, from 1890 to 1936, we exploit exogenous variation in transport technology in order to test the validity of the monocentric city model. Endogenously determining the CBD, we conduct cross-section and time difference analysis and model the land gradient in terms of straight-line distance and travel times. A counterfactual scenario indicates that a large proportion of urban decentralization is attributable to improvements in transport infrastructure. Controlling for spatial dependency, results suggest that the monocentric model fitted the city structure until the mid 20th century.

Keywords: Transport Innovations, Land Values, Location Productivity, Economic History

JEL Classification: N7, N9, R33, O12

Suggested Citation

Ahlfeldt, Gabriel M. and Wendland, Nicolai, Fifty Years of Urban Accessibility: The Impact of Urban Railway Network on the Land Gradient in Industrializing Berlin (October 2008). KOF Working Paper No. 208, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1288058 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1288058

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt (Contact Author)

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Geography and Environment ( email )

Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/ahlfeldg/

Nicolai Wendland

Touro University ( email )

1602 Avenue J
New York, NY 10010
United States

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