Portage and Path Dependence

By Hoyt Bleakley, Jeffrey Lin. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011

598 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine portage sites in the U.S. South, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, including those on the fall line, a geomorphological feature in the southeastern U.S. marking the final rapids on rivers before the ocean. Historically, waterborne transport of goods required portage around the falls at these points, while some falls provided water power during early industrialization. These factors attracted commerce and manufacturing. Although these original advantages have long since been made obsolete, we document the continuing importance of these portage sites over time. We interpret these results as path dependence and contrast explanations based on sunk costs interacting with decreasing versus increasing returns to scale.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7b41c682c6ff8ac74073e9f67e37d6f9f77315b

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Citations in the corpus

Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics (2015, unknown): “Bleakely and Lin (2012) show contrasting evidence that a temporary locational advantage can have long-lasting effects on population density.”
History, Path Dependence and Development: Evidence from Colonial Railroads, Settlers and Cities in Kenya (2017, unknown): “For each dependent variable, we then create a placebo dummy equal to one if the location is less than X km from a placebo line (X = 30, 10 and 10 km respectively).”
City Age and City Size (2014, methodology): “Provided γ > 0, this shows that older cities are larger on average since they had longer time to grow under the process specified in (2).”
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines (2015, unknown): “Support for this research at the Boston RDC from NSF (ITR-0427889) is also gratefully acknowledged.”
How Close Is Close? The Spatial Reach of Agglomeration Economies (2020, unknown): “Since the technological forces governing agglomeration have changed profoundly, this implies that equilibrium patterns of agglomeration change slowly, consistent with evidence from Bleakley and Lin (2012) and others.”
From periphery to core: measuring agglomeration effects using high-speed rail (2018, background): “…experiments such as trade liberalization (Hanson, 1996, 1997), wartime bombing (Davis & Weinstein, 2002), the decrease in the economic relevance of portage sites (Bleakley & Lin, 2014), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (Kline & Moretti, 2014) on the spatial distribution of economic activity.”
Dutch Disease or Agglomeration? The Local Economic Effects of Natural Resource Booms in Modern America (2018, unknown): “[13] Bleakley, Hoyt, and Jeffrey Lin (2012).”