Economics of Transportation最新文献

I examine road taxes in a polycentric city where congestion coexists with housing supply restrictions. Despite the quantity distortion that housing supply constraints cause, I show that the socially optimal tax for using a road is still its marginal external cost. However, the artificial housing scarcity generates potential profits, which are either accrued by the construction sector or absorbed by raising land prices. If land rents and developer profits are not fully recycled within the urban area, the Pigouvian road tax ceases to maximize the welfare of that area. To maximize local welfare, road tolls should then lie below (above) their Pigouvian level insofar as they increase (decrease) housing demand in areas where supply cannot be adjusted upwards. I derive analytical formulas for the impact of other spatially relevant aspects on the optimal road tax. Property taxes and spatially invariant lump-sum transfers can both render the Pigouvian rule for taxing road externalities suboptimal.

On 24 April 2017, fines for the most serious speeding offences increased from 100% to 150% of relevant weekly income in England and Wales. In this paper we establish whether this policy saved lives. Using data on all road accidents reported to police we evaluate the effects of this increased financial penalty using a two-year bandwidth and applying Regression Discontinuity in Time and Difference-in-Difference methods. Overall, we find no evidence of reduced serious or fatal accidents following the policy, indicating most drivers are not significantly changing their risky behaviours when confronted with higher penalties. There is, however, some evidence of fewer accidents in more economically advantaged areas. This suggests that drivers are responding to the amount of the fine increase rather than the income share and wealthier drivers are therefore more affected.

In this paper we consider a fiscal federation and study the effects of decentralised provision of loss-generating public services with benefit spillovers to other regions. We use public transport provision across administrative borders as a prototype example. We show in a formal model that local governments might be better off when a higher-level government or a neighbouring region provides these services, and even privatisation to a monopolist can be preferred over decentralisation. Our model reveals that these results are governed by a variant of the tax exporting mechanism that applies to subsidised services, i.e., the possibility that local consumers can exploit spillover benefits without contributing to the subsidy burden of service provision. Public transport provision is one of the large sectors of public policy where decentralisation could provide social benefits, but, as the paper reveals, the need for subsidies generates a genuine conflict of interest between the governments involved.

We analyse the sources of economies and diseconomies of scale in On-Demand Ridepooling (ODRP), disentangling three effects: when demand grows, average costs are reduced due to i) a larger fleet that diminishes waiting and walking times (Mohring Effect), and ii) matching users with more similar routes (Better-matching Effect). A counter-balance force (Extra-detour Effect), occurs when iii) the number of passengers per vehicle increases and users face longer detours. At low demand levels, there is little sharing and the Mohring effect prevails; as demand grows, more passengers per vehicle push for the Extra-detour Effect to dominate; eventually, vehicles run at capacity, and the Better-matching Effect prevails. The last two effects are specific to ODRP as the routes are not fixed but adapted online. Our simulations show that considering both users' and operators’ costs, scale economies prevail, and that ODRP with human-driven vehicles and walks allowed has total costs similar to door-to-door systems with driverless vehicles.

Portugal moved from having less than 200 km of motorways in the early 1980s to having the fourth highest motorway density relative to population in the European Union in 2019. This paper studies the relationship between the development of the Portuguese motorway network between 1981 and 2011 and the growth of population and employment at the local level. We address the endogeneity of the geography of motorways using instrumental variables based on a map of dirt roads from the late 18th century and the main roads of a 1945 road plan. Our findings suggest that, on average, motorways caused large increases in population – and even larger increases in employment – in the municipalities that received them. We also find that motorways contributed to suburbanisation, as the impact of motorways on population growth (but not on employment growth) is stronger in suburban municipalities. Another important nonlinearity is that motorways appear to have influenced urban agglomeration dynamics, as their effect on the growth of the local population between 1981 and 2011 depends on the size of the local population in 1970.

This paper analyzes profit-maximizing pricing in a model of shared vehicle (SV) market, with particular emphasis on spatial inequality of demand. I show that the best policy assigns a score to every location, and rewards (penalizes) customers for relocating the vehicle to a place with higher (lower) score. Such spatially explicit pricing enables providers to expand the vehicle dropoff “home” area into otherwise unprofitable low-density suburban areas and into for-fee parking zones. A greater geographic coverage has positive spillovers on operations within the initial home area. The empirical part of the paper uses novel microdata on SV trips to develop a strategy to estimate demand parameters, extrapolate them into larger counterfactual home area, evaluate optimal location scores, and predict profit gains from the expansion.

This study theoretically examines disaster adaptation investments under risk of natural disasters. Given two neighboring, competitive ports, the disasters may cause independent damages to either port, or to both ports simultaneously; consequently, some shippers avoid loss by using the unaffected port if an independent disaster occurs in their local port. Since such inter-port risk sharing benefit increases with the share of independent disasters in all disasters, the socially optimal investment decreases with the disaster independence. However, the risk sharing benefit only attributes to the shippers' surplus and does not attribute to profits from the port management, so it does not affect investment of private port authorities that maximize the profits. Such an ignorance of the risk sharing benefit by the private port authorities is likely to lead to underinvestment in disaster adaptation facilities under a lower disaster independence.

This paper investigates how concession revenue sharing between an airport and an incumbent airline affects the strategic flight frequency choice of that airline for entry deterrence and thus, profits and welfare. Specifically, we construct a model in which the incumbent airline confronts the entry threat of an entrant airline and strategically decides whether to deter or accommodate the entrant airline by choosing its flight frequency. We show that concession revenue sharing between the airport and the incumbent airline may enhance the market power of the incumbent airline, which improves or harms welfare. In addition, concession revenue sharing also diminishes the incentive for the incumbent airline to deter entry, which improves welfare. Our novel results provide important policy implications by determining that the effects of concession revenue sharing depend on the revenue share rate and the airport capacity.

We use a large dataset from the Chilean unemployment insurance program covering 20% of all formal sector workers to study the impact of commuting time on the likelihood of sick-leave in Santiago, Chile. Our empirical results indicate that longer commuting times are associated with an increase in the probability of sick-leave work absence. A 20% decrease in commuting times would generate close to 36 million dollars per year in productivity benefits. Our results also suggest that commuting travel time improvements targeted to women, lower paid workers and relatively older workers would provide the highest benefits in terms of lowering sick-leave behavior. We also find evidence that mobility infrastructure investments, such as metro and commuter rail expansions, reduce the probability of sick-leave. The results of this paper have implications for measuring the social costs of congestion and for the estimation of the wider economic benefits of transport projects.

This paper analyzes single-till regulation and dual-till regulation of a monopoly infrastructure, and clarifies conditions under which different stakeholders prefer one regulation type to the other. When a regulator maximizes the utility of consumers, the profit of service providers, or the weighted sum of both, it prefers single-till regulation when there is a positive profit from the non-core good. On the contrary, when the regulator maximizes the profit of the (infrastructure) monopoly, dual-till regulation is preferred if the profit from the non-core good is positive. Under a positive profit from the non-core good, consumers and service providers prefer single-till regulation, while the monopoly prefers dual-till regulation. Consumers and service providers thus have an opposite preference to the monopoly. If a regulator implements dual-till regulation under a positive profit from the non-core good, it reveals its preference for the monopoly's profit, suggesting that the regulator may be captured by the monopoly.