Which Americans experience the worst infrastructure? What are the costs of living with that infrastructure? We measure road roughness throughout America using vertical acceleration data from Uber rides across millions of American roads. Our measure correlates strongly and positively with other...

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...

The recent debates on infrastructure spending have led to renewed interest in the measurement of infrastructure and its effects on growth and well-being. This paper updates estimates of one important type of infrastructure capital--highways and streets. We compare BEA's capital measures with...

Road maintenance constitutes a significant component of public transportation spending at all levels of government. Formulation of efficient transportation infrastructure policy requires information about factors affecting road and traffic conditions. We generate the first causal evidence that...

This paper quantifies the value of US highways and their contribution in shaping regional specialization patterns and facilitating internal and external market integration. We develop a multisector general equilibrium model of interregional and international trade with many locations in the...

Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers' costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation...

The importance of increments to an existing highway system depends upon their contributions to the accessibility provided by the existing network. Nearly 40 years ago, Mohring [1965] suggested this logic for planning optimal highway investment programs. He argued it could be implemented by...

A large fraction of Uganda's population continues to earn a living from quasi-subsistence agriculture. This paper uses a static general equilibrium model to explore the relationships between high transportation costs, low productivity, and the size of the quasi-subsistence sector. We...

In public sector procurement, social welfare often depends on the time taken to complete the contract. A leading example is highway construction, where slow completion times inflict a negative externality on commuters. Recently, highway departments have introduced innovative contracting methods...

This paper constructs updated measures of productive highway capital stocks at the total, Interstate, Non-interstate, and Local System levels to estimate the contribution of all highways (all public roads) to GDP growth. It presents three types of contribution to GDP growth estimates and an...