Economics of Transportation最新文献

Airline fuel consumption is costly for the firms and for society as well due to a climate-change externality. We study how fuel-price changes affect cost-minimizing choices by airlines that have implications for the extent of this externality. The airline industry’s capital stock can be easily inventoried as a set of long-lived, durable aircraft. This portfolio approach allows us to study the utilization and composition of the capital stock at a highly disaggregated level. Changes in airline operations directed toward conserving fuel can be an important path toward lower emissions.

This study examines the on-time performance (OTP) effects of the 2016 Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to remove takeoff and landing limits at Newark Liberty Airport. Using the synthetic control method, we compare Newark Liberty’s OTP to that of a weighted collection of comparable airports in the United States. Exploiting the regulatory change as a credibly exogenous shock to arrival OTP, we find that arrival delay minutes increased by up to 23 min from an average of 8 min, while the share of late-arriving flights increased by up to 14 percentage points. These results are robust to other measures of arrival OTP.

Excess capacity poses a persistent challenge for airports as they often encounter lumpy capacity problems. The excess capacity is primarily influenced by factors such as uncertain demand, airline competition, airport pricing strategies, and the market structure of the airport industry. However, airport business practices also account for this issue. Using data from 59 U.S. airports between 2009 and 2019, we found that residual airports have less unused capacity than compensatory airports. This can be explained by the control of signatory airlines over the residual airports’ investment decisions and the lack of retained earnings under the residual agreement. We did not detect a significant difference in excess capacity between single-purpose and multipurpose governance forms. However, it is noteworthy that large hub airports exhibit higher capacity utilization compared to medium hub airports. Airports dominated by LCCs have higher capacity utilization rates, while the unused capacity remains consistent between cargo and non-cargo airports.

Whether the improvement of transportation infrastructure could enhance the innovation output of firms has attracted attention worldwide. However, evidence from the micro firm level, especially in developing countries, are still scarce. This paper takes the construction of highways in China as a quasi-natural experiment and demonstrate that transportation infrastructure significantly facilitates the innovation output of local firms. Further analysis demonstrates that the innovation effect has three channels: reducing labor wage distortion, easing firm financing constraints, and promoting knowledge spillover. Among them, the key channel is the knowledge spillover effect, especially that from downstream of the value chain. The heterogeneity analysis shows that highway expansion has larger effect on the innovation output of domestic invested firms (including state-owned and private firms), large-scale firms, and knowledge-intensive firms.

In recent years, aggregation platforms in the ride-sourcing (RS) market, such as Gaode, Meituan, and Baidu, have integrated the RS services offered by multiple independent RS companies. The emergence of aggregation platforms can alleviate the problem of market fragmentation. However, the poor regulatory level of the aggregation platform poses numerous issues, such as low vehicle and driver compliance rates, prominent safety hazards, and difficulty for passengers to claim their rights, which distract passengers to a great extent. Thus, this paper proposes an optimization model that considers the impact of the regulatory level of the aggregation platform on heterogeneous travelers. At the uppermost level, the aggregation platform determines the appropriate regulatory level and charges RS companies a commission fee. In the middle level, RS companies determine the optimal trip fare. The travel choice of customers is modeled as the lowest level. The study provides reference to regulate the aggregation platforms.

We provide a model of local railway passengers service able to account for the main specific characteristics of the sector under vertical separation. Afterwards, we use this model to carry out both a normative analysis of the operators’ investment decisions and an assessment of the welfare effects of simple regulatory instruments. We show that, because of the information asymmetry of train operating company about the productivity of the infrastructure manager, the introduction of a regulatory instrument inducing the former to internalize the effect of her investment on the latter’s cost of providing access may be welfare reducing.

Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.

Competitive passenger rail can help people access new or better jobs or bring new business opportunities. This paper studies the wider economic impacts on local unemployment of the liberalized passenger rail between Ostrava, the third-biggest city in the Czech Republic, and Prague, its capital. The local impacts are estimated at the LAU 1 level (administrative districts) using the event study and difference-in-differences method. The liberalization motivated the entry of two new private providers to compete with the public provider. The resulting competition in ticket prices, the number of connections, and service quality had a strong beneficial effect on labor market connectivity and business opportunities in connected districts. It significantly reduced unemployment in the districts along the rail line compared with the control districts. The effect, however, weakens with the level of urbanization of the treated district and with the distance from the rail. It could partly be transmitted through better skill matching on the back of higher inward and outward migration, higher firm entry and lower firm exit from the local market, as well as more business opportunities for self-employed entrepreneurs.

We present a simple dynamic traffic model to study whether public information about road conditions increases or decreases travel times. We find that the effect depends on comparing (1) the increase in travel time when a road with a pre-existing delay becomes congested, and (2) the corresponding increase on a road with no pre-existing delay. Traffic reports are helpful when the first value is large relative to the second. Surprisingly, they are less useful when total road capacity is sufficient to potentially accommodate all drivers without congestion. In that case, traffic reports are always harmful in the nonatomic limit as individual drivers become negligible.

This study considers an international transportation market wherein a high-speed rail (HSR) firm engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) competes with both domestic and foreign airlines with differentiated services. We investigate and compare two CSR types, mandatory CSR, imposed by the government, and voluntary CSR, chosen by the HSR operator, and show that mandatory CSR can be lower or higher than voluntary CSR, depending on the transportation subsidy types offered. With uniform subsidies, mandatory CSR together with a higher subsidy is lower than voluntary CSR, which yields higher profits for domestic firms and higher social welfare, while the opposite result can be found with discriminatory subsidies. We further explore the welfare effect of HSR privatization policies with CSR activities. We find that irrespective of the CSR types and subsidy types, privatization with subsidies always improves social welfare; however, privatization with mandatory (voluntary) CSR improves (reduces) social welfare in the absence of subsidies. These findings suggest that post-privatization with CSR activities may be harmful to society without an appropriately designed subsidy policy and should be monitored by antitrust agencies.