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Associate
Expertise: urban economics, economic geography, trade, labour economics
Ferdinand Rauch holds the Chair of Labour Economics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Vienna.
Current areas of research include:
We examine "agglomeration shadows" that emerge around large cities, which discourage some economic activities in nearby areas. Identifying agglomeration shadows is complicated, however, by endogenous city formation and "... Read more...
Richard Hornbeck, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch
26 June 2024
In this paper we study the role of within-city roads layout in fostering city growth. Within-city roads networks have not been studied extensively in economics although they are essential to facilitate human interactions... Read more...
Paul Brandily and Ferdinand Rauch
20 March 2024
This paper studies how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed counties’ market potential and influenced the economic geography of the USA. We compute shipment effective distances with and without the canal from ... Read more...
Stephan Maurer and Ferdinand Rauch
25 March 2022
How do trade networks persist following disruptions of political networks? We study different types of persistence following the decline of the Hanseatic League using a panel of 21,590 city-level trade flows over 190 yea... Read more...
Max Marczinek, Stephan Maurer and Ferdinand Rauch
02 February 2022
History (sometimes) matters for the location and sizes of cities and neighborhood segregation patterns within cities. Together with evidence on rapid neighborhood change and self-fulfilling expectations, this implies tha... Read more...
Jeffrey Lin and Ferdinand Rauch
05 January 2022
We study the causal relationship between geographic connectedness and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the... Read more...
Jan David Bakker, Stephan Maurer, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Ferdinand Rauch
01 October 2021
Africa’s demand for urban housing is soaring, even as it faces a proliferation of slums. In this setting, can modest infrastructure investments in greenfield areas where people subsequently build their own houses facilit... Read more...
Neeraj Baruah, Amanda Dahlstrand, Guy Michaels, Dzhamilya Nigmatulina, Ferdinand Rauch and Tanner Regan
01 July 2021
Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, little is known about the process of urbanization across the continent. This paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass ... Read more...
Jan David Bakker, Christopher Parsons and Ferdinand Rauch
01 June 2020
Does economic activity move away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which displaced more than 650 million people worldwide in the last 35 years. We st... Read more...
Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K.J. McDermott, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch
01 April 2020
In the early 20th century a ship travelling from San Francisco to New York or on to Europe first had to travel over 13,000 miles around the entirety of South America. That all changed in August of 1914 with the opening o... Read more...
27 July 2019
This paper studies how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed market access and influenced the economic geography of the United States. We compute shipment distances with and without the canal from each US count... Read more...
09 July 2019
We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using over 3,000 verbs from more than 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro dat... Read more...
Guy Michaels, Ferdinand Rauch and Stephen J. Redding
01 June 2019
Stephan Maurer and colleagues investigate the growth effects of one of the first trade expansions in history: the crossing of the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians ... Read more...
01 March 2019
We study the causal connection between trade and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenicians. We cons... Read more...
12 July 2018
We study trade in Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another after 1989 than predicted by a standard gravity m... Read more...
Matthias Beestermöller and Ferdinand Rauch
29 June 2018
Do fixed geographic features such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse o... Read more...
Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch
01 February 2018
We present evidence that a significant fraction of commuters on the London Underground do not travel on their optimal route. We show that a strike on the Underground, which forced many commuters to experiment with new ro... Read more...
Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems
01 November 2017
What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study "Sites and Services" projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during ... Read more...
27 September 2017
Gravity equations in trade imply that trade flows are proportional to the size of a country and inversely proportional to distance. This paper develops the analogy of gravity in physics with gravity in trade and provides... Read more...
Ferdinand Rauch
01 November 2016
Economic activity tends to return to flood-prone areas after floods rather than relocating to higher ground. What’s more, cities built in flood-prone areas are locking in exposure to flood risk for the long term. These a... Read more...
22 February 2016
Does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which are among the costliest and most common natural disasters. Over the past... Read more...
17 December 2015
In February 2014, strikes by staff on London's underground network enabled a sizeable fraction of commuters to find better routes, according to research by Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems. Many commuters w... Read more...
06 November 2015
We estimate that a significant fraction of commuters on the London underground do not travel their optimal route. Consequently, a tube strike (which forced many commuters to experiment with new routes) taught commuters a... Read more...
21 September 2015
After the fall of the Roman Empire, urban life in France became a shadow of its former self, but in Britain it completely disappeared. Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch use these contrasting experiences as a natural exper... Read more...
05 February 2014
Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of ... Read more...
27 November 2013
We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro-data from t... Read more...
05 February 2013
This paper studies the effect of a change in the marginal costs of advertising on advertising expenditures of firms and consumer prices across industries. It makes use of a unique policy change that caused a decrease of ... Read more...
26 August 2011
Using a novel dataset with transactions level exports data from four African countries (Malawi, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper uncovers evidence of a high degree of experimentation at the extensive margin associ... Read more...
Olivier Cadot, Leonardo Iacovone, Denisse Pierola and Ferdinand Rauch
01 June 2011
This paper exploits the surge in Chinese exports from 1994 to 2004 as a natural experiment to evaluate the effects of a unilateral low wage trade and competition shock to producers in Mexico. We find that this shock caus... Read more...
Leonardo Iacovone, Ferdinand Rauch and L. Alan Winters
01 September 2010
This paper presents new evidence on urbanization using sub-county data for the United States from 1880-2000 and municipality data for Brazil from 1970-2000. We show that the two central stylized features of population gr... Read more...
01 October 2008
