Brown Bag Seminar: The Spark and the Rail. The Impact of Railway Electrification in Italy

This paper examines the effects of railway electrification on local demographic development in Italy between 1901 and 1961. We first build a new dataset that tracks the progressive electrification of the Italian railway network. Then, we use these data to estimate the impact of a municipality gaining access to the newly electrified railroads on its population growth. We find that municipalities near electrified lines experienced approximately seven percentage points more population growth than comparable non-electrified localities. Effects were highly heterogeneous across node types: terminal municipalities gained about thirty percentage points, against almost no effect for intermediate settlements along the same lines. The results suggest that infrastructure modernisation concentrates its benefits at network focal points, reinforcing pre-existing territorial inequalities.