Public Infrastructure and Economic Development: Evidence from Postal Systems, A Replication Study of Rogowski et al. (American Journal of Political Science, 2022)
Rogowski et al. (2022) use secondary data to study the impact of historic postal infrastructure on economic development, both cross-country and within the US. Their results suggest a large positive effect of post offices on economic development that is robust across various sensitivity checks. We successfully computationally reproduce all results. In a robustness assessment, we find the results to be robust to simple changes in the analysis but observe some sensitivity to accounting for spatial trends in the long-term cross-country analysis. Despite this, we find the results to be overall robust given the numerous analyses and robustness checks in the original paper.
Neubauer, F., J. Rose and J. Ankel-Peters (2025), Public Infrastructure and Economic Development: Evidence from Postal Systems, A Replication Study of Rogowski et al. (American Journal of Political Science, 2022). Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, 4, 2025-5
DOI: 10.18718/81781.44