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Title:

Highway Infrastructure Investment and Regional Employment Growth: Dynamic Panel Regression Analysis

Accession Number:

01044597

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

As a measure of the economic development impact stemming from transport infrastructure, the employment impact of transport investment has been a subject of considerable interest within academic research and practitioner communities for decades. Yet, conflicting evidence has emerged in the literature, which generally relies on simple regression analysis and may suffer from several basic methodological problems. Focusing on the actual impacts after the construction phase, this paper empirically investigates whether and the extent to which investments in highways contribute to aggregate county-level employment in the private sector of the State of North Carolina, United States. Given the potential for unobserved regional heterogeneity and lagged responses of the labor market to any exogenous shock, we estimate dynamic panel models with the density of highway lane-miles representing the extent and coverage of the highway network as an independent variable, using panel data for all 100 North Carolina counties over the period 1985-1997. Estimation problems of endogeneity and weak instruments have been explicitly addressed by means of a system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator. Our main results are that the employment effect of highway infrastructure depends critically on the model specification considered, and it is essential to account for the dynamics of employment adjustment and potential endogeneity of highway infrastructure to avoid biases in the estimated effect of highways.

Monograph Accession #:

01042056

Report/Paper Numbers:

07-0133

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Jiwattanakulpaisarn, Piyapong
Noland, Robert B
Graham, Daniel Joseph
Polak, John W

Pagination:

43p

Publication Date:

2007

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 86th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2007-1-21 to 2007-1-25
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

CD-ROM

Features:

Figures; References; Tables

Uncontrolled Terms:

Road networks

Geographic Terms:

North Carolina

Subject Areas:

Data and Information Technology; Economics; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Society; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2007 Paper #07-0133

Files:

TRIS, TRB

Created Date:

Feb 8 2007 4:41PM