The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification
利用二战后德国分裂和1990年东西德统一作为自然实验，发现靠近东西德边界的西德城市人口增长显著下降，证明市场准入对经济发展的重要性。
This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence for the importance of market access for economic development. In line with a standard new economic geography model, we find that, following division, cities in West Germany close to the East-West German border experienced a substantial decline in population growth relative to other West German cities. We show that the model can account for the quantitative magnitude of our findings and provide additional evidence against alternative possible explanations.