We estimate an equilibrium model of residential sorting with endogenous traffic congestion to evaluate the efficiency and equity impacts of urban transportation policies. Leveraging fine-scale data on household travel diaries and housing transactions with home and work locations in Beijing, we...

In cities worldwide, the widespread use of single occupancy cars often leads to traffic congestion and its associated ill effects. Using high frequency data from Google Maps, we test whether high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) policies can be an effective tool to combat congestion. Using the unexpected...

We characterize optimal urban transportation policies in the presence of congestion and environmental externalities and evaluate their welfare and distributional effects. We present a framework of a municipal government that implements different transportation equilibria through its choice of...

We develop novel estimates of peak and off-peak price elasticities for urban mass transit demand in San Francisco using a large natural experiment with 3.6 million trip sessions and a natural field experiment that both have exogenous price subsidies. We then estimate the welfare impacts for...

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...

SARS-CoV-2 has had a greater burden, as measured by rate of infection, in poorer communities within cities. For example, 55% of Mumbai slums residents had antibodies to COVID-19, 3.2 times the seroprevalence in non-slum areas of the city according to a sero-survey done in July 2020. One...

We develop a methodology to estimate robust city level vehicular mobility indices, and apply it to 154 Indian cities using 22 million counterfactual trips measured by a web mapping service. There is wide variation in mobility across cities. An exact decomposition shows this variation is driven...