Highway construction occurs nowadays mainly through widening of existing roads rather than building new roads. This paper documents that highway widenings considerably reduce congestion in the short run, defined here as 6 years. Using longitudinal microdata from highway detector loops in the...

This paper is the first to examine the effect of minimum price guaranteesin a sequential search model. Minimum price guarantees are notadvertised and only known to consumers when they come to the shop.We show that in such an environment, minimum price guarantees increasethe value of buying the...

In Europe, company cars are offered by employers as fringe benefits to their employees at a lower price than employees pay in the car market, mainly due to favourable taxation of company cars. We analyse the welfare effects of favourable taxation of company cars for the Netherlands. The...

This paper investigates the welfare effect of adverse weather through changes in the speed of individuals’ car commuting trips in the entire Netherlands. Weather measurements are local and time specific (hourly basis). As most commuters travel twice a day between home and work, we are able to...

It has been argued that urban planning policies, through minimum parking requirements, and income tax policies induce free employer parking. We show that tax policies induce welfare losses in the order of 12% of parking resource costs, implying an annual deadweight loss in the order of € 5...