The main goal of this paper is to provide evidence for the joint causal effect of the highway and railway infrastructure on the suburbanization of population in European cities. This is considered a major issue in Europe, which has never been studied before at this scale. We constructed a unique population and transport infrastructure dataset covering 579 cities from 29 European countries during the period 1961-2011. We highlight the persistence of history and geography in European cities by using historical instruments and by explicitly controlling for such variables. Our main results suggest that an additional highway ray displaced approximately 6% of the central city population in European cities during the period 1961-2011 on average, whereas the same estimate for radial railways was roughly 3%. We also employ the heterogeneity of the European cities and countries in order to detect different patterns of the same effect based on city size, country income, geographical location and EU Regional Funds. These findings are novel and yield valuable insights for the European transport and regional policies. Joint with Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López and Ilias Pasidis.

Key words: suburbanization, cities, Europe, highways, railways, regional policies, history, geography.

JEL classification: R4, O4