Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

Over the last decades, hours worked per capita have declined substantially in many OECD economies. Using a neoclassical growth model with endogenous work-leisure choice, we assess the role of trend growth slowdown in accounting for the decline in hours worked. In the model, a permanent reduction...

We study the impact of techies-engineers and other technically trained workers-on firm-level productivity. We first report new facts on the role of techies in the firm by leveraging French administrative data and unique surveys. Techies are STEM-skill intensive and are associated with...

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 - is substantial,...

We study the impact on road safety of one-day massive speed limit monitoring operations (SLMO) accompanied by media campaigns that announce the SLMO and provide information on the dangers of speeding. Using register data on the universe of police reported accidents in a generalized...

This study calculates efficient taxes on gasoline and road use designed to combat driving related externalities when motorists avoid taxes due to an excessive economic driving-style. The efficient tax on gasoline is reduced below the Pigouvian rate due to such avoidance. The current US tax rate...

Pricing greenhouse gases is widely understood as the most efficient approach for mitigating climate change, yet distributional effects hamper political acceptance. These distributional effects are especially important in transport, the fastest growing sector for greenhouse gas emissions. Using...

Infrastructure projects are increasingly aiming to improve liveability, in particular in urban areas. We analyse a specific case in which an existing highway in an urban area was moved underground in order to improve intercity traffic flows and to reduce traffic externalities. As travel times...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...