This paper studies the political economy of cordon tolls, the most common form of road pricing in cities. We consider a monocentric city inhabited by renters and resident-landowners. A cordon toll raises the rental price of land within the cordon, and it reduces rents outside this area. Hence,...

We develop a positive theory of pricing car access (by parking fees or cordon tolls) to downtown commercial districts. The model accounts for the special interests of downtown retailers and competing superstores at the edge of the city, and studies how lobbying by both groups shapes the...

People who anticipate the introduction of a policy can adapt their behavior, perhaps in ways that make the policy ineffective and exacerbate the problem to be addressed. This paper develops a political economy model to study strategic behavior related to the introduction of congestion policies,...