Economics of Transportation最新文献

We propose a marginal tax reform model that includes both formal and informal sectors in the economy, traffic externalities (congestion, pollution, crashes and noise) and distributional concerns. The marginal cost of public funds (MCF) is derived for fuel taxes and public transport subsidies. The model is applied to Santiago, Chile. If MCFs are computed only taking economic efficiency into account, a revenue neutral reform within the transport sector suggests increasing the car cost and reducing the bus fare in peak periods, and reducing the car cost and increasing the bus fare in off-peak periods. However, including income inequality aversion leads to suggesting lower bus fares and higher car costs in both peak and off-peak periods, significantly changing the economic assessment of current tax and subsidy instruments. The inclusion of traffic externalities has a large effect on the MCF for fuel tax and a mild effect on MCF for bus subsidy.

Public transport provision requires substantial organisational efforts, careful planning, financial contributions from the public, and coordination between millions of passengers and staff members in large systems. Efficient resource allocation is critical in its daily operations. Therefore, public transport has been among the most popular subjects in transport economics since the infancy of this discipline. This paper presents an overview of the literature developed over the past half century, including more than 300 important contributions. With a strong methodological orientation, it collects, classifies, and compares the frequently used analytical modelling techniques, thus providing a cookbook for future research and learning efforts. We discuss key findings on optimal capacity provision, pricing, cost recovery and subsidies, externalities, private operations, public service regulation, and cross-cutting subjects, such as interlinks with urban economics, political economy, and emerging mobility technologies.

This study develops a model in which heterogeneous commuters choose their residential locations and departure times from home in a monocentric city with a bottleneck. We show that commuters sort themselves both temporally and spatially according to their value of time and flexibility at the equilibria with and without optimal congestion pricing. These two equilibria exhibit fundamentally different properties, indicating that congestion pricing alters the urban spatial structure. We then consider two cases wherein richer commuters are either more flexible or less flexible and demonstrate that (a) congestion pricing makes cities denser and more compact in the former, whereas it causes cities to become less dense and to expand spatially in the latter; (b) in both cases, pricing helps rich commuters but hurts poor commuters. We further reveal that expanding capacity financed by the revenue from congestion pricing could be regressive in a city where richer commuters are less flexible.

We depart from the individual view behind those time allocation models aimed at the calculation of the value of leisure (VoL) when dealing with two-worker households, as this (prevailing) view requires approximations and assumptions that do not hold well. As the existing theories that consider the household deals with time allocation but not with time values, we propose an integration of some elements of both theories, generating a model with a collective view from which the VoL can be obtained. We argue theoretically that this model yields larger VoL and contains elements that should diminish the possible gap in VoL between the workers. The improved model is applied using Chilean data verifying its theoretical properties at various levels and correcting counterintuitive results obtained with the individual model.

The existence of discrimination by the sellers of second-hand cars is a little studied subject, whereas the possibility of acquiring a car conditions multiple aspects of economic and social life. In this article, we apply the correspondence test method to the purchase of a used car in order to measure the extent of discrimination in this market according to the ethnic origin, gender, place of residence and age of the applicant. We constructed six profiles of fictitious individuals, perfectly similar except for their age, gender, origin indicated by the consonance of their surname and first name or place of residence. Between January and May 2015, we used these fictitious profiles to respond to 489 used car sales ads located in Ile-de- France. Statistical analysis of the responses to these tests reveals the existence of discrimination according to gender and place of residence. The analysis shows that information based discrimination prevails on the second-hand car market rather than taste based discriminations.

This paper studies the role of workplace parking policies and illustrates it for the Barcelona agglomeration. We adapt the Brueckner and Franco (2018) analytical model for Western European cities by adding agglomeration externalities, public transport congestion and underground parking. Workers can choose to locate in the city centre or in the suburbs. Commuting to the city centre requires either commuting by car and parking or public transport. Two policies to address inefficiencies of employer-paid parking are compared: employee-paid parking and a workplace parking levy. It is shown how employee-paid parking generates additional agglomeration economies, while a workplace parking levy may have opposite effects. The numerical illustration for Barcelona indicates that the welfare effects of workplace parking policies in a second-best setting are dominated by agglomeration effects. These are three times larger than the welfare changes in the transport and land use markets.

Air transport capacity expansions are often justified on the grounds that they will improve economic performance and induce growth. Such causal impacts are hard to identify empirically due to the fundamentally endogenous nature of the relationship between air transport and the economy. This paper contributes to the empirical literature on aviation-economy effects by conducting a case study of the impacts of air transportation activity on productivity in Chinese provinces. For exogenous variation we exploit a policy scenario created by the 2003 deregulation of the Chinese aviation sector, which was applied in all provinces of China except Beijing and Tibet. We find that this policy intervention resulted in substantial growth in air transport passengers and cargo. We estimate the causal effect of air transport on productivity by comparing GDP per employee in Tibet relative to a synthetic control region affected by the deregulation policy. We find a significant positive productivity effect from aviation expansion following the 2003 deregulation. Use of a differences-in-differences specification confirms this result.

Static traffic models, in the tradition of Walters (1961), typically feature a ‘‘demand curve’’ giving the vehicle flow demanded for each unit travel time (inverse speed). Traditionally, the demand curve declines because people want to drive more as travel times fall. This paper proposes that the vehicle flow demanded can, instead, plausibly rise with unit travel time (a phenomenon we call ‘‘hyperdemand’’), if congestion somehow induces some people to switch from high-to low-occupancy modes. To illustrate, we present a model of travel in an isotropic downtown where people choose among not traveling, a low-occupancy mode called ‘‘Alone’’ and a high-occupancy mode called ‘‘Pool.’’ Pool trips detour to pick up and drop off passengers en route, so congestion delays them more than Alone trips. Consequently, multiple equilibria can arise even in ‘‘light congestion,’’ and small toll increases can have dramatic impacts by eliminating equilibria.

This paper synthesises the findings of surveys of consumer willingness-to-pay for vehicle automation. Some studies report only mean or median estimates of willingness-to-pay for vehicle automation. Other studies provide data enabling demand functions to be derived. Six demand functions have been estimated and are compared. Maximum willingness-to-pay (around 25,000 to 40,000 US dollars) exceeds low estimates of the added costs of automated vehicles (around 10,000 US dollars). On average, close to 30% of respondents state zero willingness to pay more for an automated car than for a conventional car. Based on current knowledge, it is likely that a majority of consumers will initially find automated vehicles too expensive. However, the price of automated vehicles can be expected to fall as technology matures and vehicles are manufactured in larger numbers.

This study aims to find empirical evidence whether local feeder ports as small-scale investments in public infrastructure affect the economic activity at the sub-district level. The motivation for the study originated from the fact that the public invests heavily in small-scale projects when market failures occur. However, there is a lack of empirical studies on the impact of these investments because of data unavailability and their small marginal contribution at a more aggregated level. Using Difference-in-Differences that exploit staggered implementation of small-port operations, we found that the opening of small ports increased the night light intensity, a measure that captures local economic activity, by 1.8 per cent. Although the benefits reach beyond the sub-district where the port is situated, it takes more than two years to deliver its relatively small impact, and it might be not cost-effective.