We estimate the marginal external congestion cost of motor-vehicle travel for Rome, Italy, using a methodology that accounts for hypercongestion (a situation where congestion decreases a road’s throughput). We show that the external cost – even when roads are not hypercongested...

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,...

In classical traffic flow theory, there are two velocities associated with a given level of traffic flow. Following Vickrey, economists have termed travel at the higher speed congested travel and at the lower speed hypercongested travel. Since the publication of Walters. classic paper, there has...

In downtown areas, what proportion of curbside should be allocated to parking? In contrast to most previous work on the economics of parking, this paper focuses on optimal curbside parking capacity in both first-best (where pricing is efficient) and second-best (where pricing is inefficient)...

The goal of this paper is to bring some unity to the theoretical side of the debate on internalization of airport congestion by showing that all the literature's theoretical results can be derived within one simple and unified framework. The analysis starts by replicating the results of...

Electricity transmission redistributes environmental impacts across space. We exploit episodes of high electricity transmission system congestion to explore changes in ambient concentrations of air pollutants in the eastern United States. Reducing electricity system congestion decreases ozone...

Tax aversion makes it politically challenging to introduce Pigouvian taxes. One proposed solution to overcome this resistance is to package policies. Using an online lab experiment, we investigate whether combining a tax and a subsidy is perceived as more acceptable than the tax or the subsidy...

How do voters allocate costly attention to alternative political issues? And how does selective ignorance of voters interact with policy design by politicians? We address these questions by developing a model of electoral competition with rationally inattentive voters. Rational inattention...

We analyse two mechanism designs for refunding emission payments to polluting firms: output-based refunding (OBR) and expenditure-based refunding (EBR). In both instruments, emission fees are returned to the polluting industry, typically making the policy more politically acceptable than a...

The supply of allowances in the European Union Emissions Trading System is determined within a rigid allocation programme. A reform of the EU ETS intends to make allowances allocation exible and contingent on the state of the system. We model the emissions market under adjustable allowance...