Maurizio Conti (University of Genoa)
Anna Bottasso, Massimiliano Bratti and Agata Maida
Using Italian administrative data on the population of private-sector workers from 2005 to 2022, we examine how the opening of high-speed rail (HSR) routes expands labor market opportunities. To this end, we estimate gravity-type models at a high level of spatial granularity (municipality) and implement a staggered difference-in-differences research design. We find that the development of new HSR routes induced workers to change their employment location along these routes, with heterogeneous treatment effects by gender, age, contract type, and job qualification. Moreover, such effect is found to be increasing over time, eventually generating additional job relocations of about 12,000 workers per year, and largely due to flows between large municipalities and from small to large ones. The estimation of an AKM model suggests that the connection to the HSR network induced an increase in assortative matching at municipal level.