Skip to main content

Dr Ferdinand Rauch.

Dr Ferdinand Rauch

Associate

Expertise: international trade, urban economics

Telephone:
+44(0)1865 281165
Email:
ferdinand.rauch@economics.ox.ac.uk
Connect:
Website
CV
Links:
CEP Urban

Biography

Ferdinand Rauch has been a Visiting Research Affiliate at the CEP since 2012. He is Associate Professor at the Economics Department of the University of Oxford.

Current areas of research include:

  • Research in recent years has focused on topics of urban economics, such as the location, growth rate and survival probability of cities, as well as international trade, such as the stability of the distance coefficient in gravity equations.

Publications

Blog
How the Panama Canal reshaped the economic geography of the United States

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...

Stephan E. Maurer and Ferdinand Rauch

27 July 2019

CEP discussion papers
Economic geography aspects of the Panama Canal

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...

Stephan E. Maurer and Ferdinand Rauch

09 July 2019

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance
Trade and growth in the Iron Age

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...

Jan David Bakker, Stephan E. Maurer, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Ferdinand Rauch

01 March 2019

CEP discussion papers
Of mice and merchants: trade and growth in the Iron Age

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...

Jan David Bakker, Stephan E. Maurer, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Ferdinand Rauch

12 July 2018

Journal article
A Dissection of Trading Capital: Trade in the Aftermath of the Fall of the Iron Curtain

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

Journal article
Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012

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

SERC Discussion Papers
Planning Ahead for Better Neighborhoods: Long Run Evidence from Tanzania

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...

Neeraj Baruah, Amanda Dahlstrand-Rudin, Guy Michaels, Dzhamilya Nigmatulina, Ferdinand Rauch and Tanner Regan

27 September 2017

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance
Flooded Cities

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...

Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K.J. McDermott, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

22 February 2016

CEP discussion papers
Flooded cities

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...

Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K.J. McDermott, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

17 December 2015

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance
The upside of London Tube strikes

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...

Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems

06 November 2015

CEP discussion papers
The benefits of forced experimentation: striking evidence from the London Underground network

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...

Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems

21 September 2015

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance
Can cities be trapped in bad locations?

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...

Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

05 February 2014

CEP discussion papers
Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012

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...

Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

27 November 2013

CEP discussion papers
Task Specialization in U.S. Cities from 1880-2000

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...

Guy Michaels, Ferdinand Rauch and Stephen J. Redding

05 February 2013

CEP discussion papers
Advertising Expenditure and Consumer Prices

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...

Ferdinand Rauch

26 August 2011

CEP discussion papers
Success and Failure of African Exporters

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

CEP discussion papers
Trade as an Engine of Creative Destruction: Mexican Experience with Chinese Competition

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

CEP discussion papers
Urbanisation and Structural Transformation

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...

Guy Michaels, Ferdinand Rauch and Stephen J. Redding

01 October 2008

spacer