Railway expansion and socioeconomic transformation in Hungary, 1880–1910

Abstract This paper examines how access to railways influenced several socioeconomic dimensions—such as educational attainment, local revenues, child mortality, tuberculosis-related deaths, and the prevalence of industrial employment—across more than 12,500 Hungarian communities during 1880 and 1910. Using matching and inverse probability weighting estimators to identify causal effects for treated settlements, we uncover positive impacts on literacy rates, settlement income and tax, and industrial workforce participation. We find no statistically significant causal effect on TBC-related deaths and infant mortality.