Will politics lead to over-building or under-building of transportation projects? In this paper, we develop a model of infrastructure policy in which politicians overdo things that have hidden costs and underperform tasks whose costs voters readily perceive. Consequently, national funding of...

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the...

This report examines the potential of data-driven approaches to improving transport infrastructure maintenance. It assesses trends in maintenance strategies, explores how the targeted use of data could make them more effective for different types of transport infrastructure, and looks into...

We develop a general equilibrium geographic framework to characterize the welfare effect of transportation infrastructure investments. We tackle three distinct but conflating challenges: First, we offer an analytical characterization of the routing problem and, in particular, how infrastructure...

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...