Files
Abstract
Prior analysis regarding transportation infrastructure has often focused on the aggregate
effects of public investment on economic growth or activity, usually at a national or state
level. Modeling efforts that attempt to treat all counties as equivalent units, while
assuming a homogeneous modeling structure for all the units, may miss important
information regarding the statistical and causal relationships between economic activity
and transportation infrastructure. This study examines the interrelationships between
infrastructure and activity using two Washington State highway infrastructure datasets in
combination with county-level employment, wage and establishment numbers for several
industrial sectors for a subset of counties from 1990 to 2004. Estimations using vector
autoregressions, error correction models and directed acyclic graphs are made. The
results show that the relationships between infrastructure investment and economic
activity are often weak and are not uniform in effect.