This paper analyzes the political economy of transport-system choice, with the goal of gaining an understanding of the forces involved in this important urban public policy decision. Transport systems pose a continuous trade-off between time and money cost, so that a city can choose a fast...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what...

Evaluating the impact of transport infrastructure meets a major challenge since rail lines are not randomly located. We use the natural experiment offered by the opening and progressive extension of the Regional Express Rail (RER) between 1970 and 2000 in the Paris metropolitan region, and in...

This paper examines the determinants of airport aeronautical charges by employing a unique panel dataset covering sixty-one European airports over an eighteen-year period. We are able to extend the literature on the role of airports as an essential element in transport infrastructure by offering...

Public agencies rely on two key modes to procure goods and services: auctions and direct negotiations. The relative advantages of these two modes are still imperfectly understood. This paper therefore studies public procurement of regional passenger railway services in Germany, where regional...

This paper presents a model of strategic locational choice by duopolistic firms in an urban area where consumer locations are endogenous and where a public facility is exogenously fixed. A welfare analysis taking their strategic behaviour into account is conducted. It is shown that the firms'...

Responsive pricing proposes to increase efficiency by introducing a direct linkage between market conditions and changes in prices. This link is established by giving selective discounts that vary in real time as a function of the level of unused capacity. Using data from a unique pricing...

Economists wishing to analyse road congestion and road pricing have usually relied on link-based speed-flow relationships. These may provide a poor description of urban congestion, which mainly arises from delays at intersections. Using the simulation model SATURN, we investigate the second-best...

This paper studies the effects of introducing competition for local passenger railway markets in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. We compare the evolution of the frequency of service on lines that were exposed to competition for the market and lines that were not. Our results suggest that...

We study bargained input prices where up and downstream firms can choose alternative vertical partners. We apply our model to airport landing fees where a number of interesting policy questions have arisen. For example, what is the impact of joint ownership of airports? Does airline...