Railways and local transformation in the Congress Kingdom of Poland: population growth and elite formation

This paper examines the economic and social effects of railway construction in the Congress Kingdom of Poland during the nineteenth century. Using data for cities and urban-type settlements, we combine population estimates for with railway access and a novel measure of elite formation based on over 4,000 notable individuals listed in the Polish Biographical Dictionary. We estimate the effects of railway access using a staggered difference-in-differences design, distinguishing between connected, nearby, and distant locations, as well as private and military lines. We find that railway access significantly increased local population growth, with no evidence of displacement from nearby unconnected towns in our sample; the effect is most credibly identified for military lines, whose routing was less directly tied to local conditions. Railway access has no detectable effect on the share of nationally notable individuals born in connected towns, while the absolute number of notable births rises. The proportional increase in notable births is almost exactly equal to the proportional increase in population, so connected towns became larger producers of national elites without becoming disproportionately important sources of them. However, pre-treatment trends are not parallel for any of the elite outcomes. Thus, we treat these results as descriptive.