Borders and Population Growth [replication package]

The data set contains 3 types of data:
1) The population data as well as data on migration (for Austria) respectively on the share of Sudeten Germans is taken from the population censuses of both countries. The overall population data as well as the migration data for Austria is available at https://www.statistik.at/datenbanken/statcube-statistische-datenbank for Austria and the overall population data from www.czso.cz/csu/czso/databaze-demografickych-udaju-za-obce-cr for the Czech Republic. The share of ethnic Germans was transcripted for the 1930 population census. All data reports the population at a municipality level in census years.
To account for the repeated changes in administrative borders of municipalities, population were harmonised to the municipality systematic of 2022 (Gemeindesystematik, 2022) in Austria and to the Obec coding of Historický atlas in the Czech Republic, respectively. For the share of ethnic Germans in the Czech Republic this was recoding done using the procedures used by the Czech statistical office.

2) Geographical data This includes data on the terrain roughness indicator, the area, the altitude data and the geo co-ordinates of each municipality. These indicators are taken from remotely sensed elevation data from Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 1 Arc-Second Global respectively the shape files provided by the statistical offices (see: https://www.data.gv.at for Austria and https://geoportal.cuzk.cz/ for the Czech Republic). These data are used to calculate the crow fly distance to the Austrian Czech border and between municipalities, wherever this is necessary and the area of municipalities.

3) Data pertaining to the location of railway -To construct an indicator variable for municipalities with a railway border crossing, we used the list of border crossings provided on Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/\"Osterreichische\_Grenzübergänge_in_die_Nachbarstaaten separated by street, rail and other crossings and the link to the respective railway line (listed in the appendix to the paper. This lists all stations on the respective railway lines as well as the year of the opening of services. From this list, we locate the last Austrian respectively first Czech station and define the municipality in which it is located as an Austrian respectively Czech border station.

Linked data files contain the following variables:

• municipality...municipality code
• country...country
• distnatbord...distance to closest national border
• mindistanceborderatcz...distance to Austrian Czech border
• year...Observation Year
• pop...Population
• dist_cap...distance to capital city
• pop_gr...population growth
• kod_kraj...code of the Czech Kraj (tier 1 regions in CR)
• countr...Numeric Country code (1=AT, 2=CZ)
• dist...Austrian district (tier 3 region)
• prov...Austrian Province (NUTS 2 region)
• nuts3_at...Austrian NUTS 3 region
• alt...altitude
• pop_den...population density
• pop_d_90...population density 1890
• pop_d_00...population density 1900
• pop_d_10...population density 1910
• di_eastb_at...distance to eastern birder of Austria
• rw...Dummy for railway border station
• foreign...Foreign born population (only Austria post 1970)
• native...Native population (only Austria post 1970)
• population 1930...population in 1930 in Czech Republic
• ger_share...Share of German population in 1930 (only for Czech Republic)

Dataset is available from Mendeley Data portal: Huber, Peter (2024), “Borders and population growth: Evidence from a century of border regime changes on the Austrian-Czech border.”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/t4wbbfmk6w.1