The recent debates on infrastructure spending have led to renewed interest in the measurement of infrastructure and its effects on growth and well-being. This paper updates estimates of one important type of infrastructure capital—highways and streets. We compare BEA's capital measures with...

This paper studies the effects of introducing legal street prostitution zones on both registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where legal street prostitution zones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. We provide evidence that the...

This research examines the impact of road construction on rural labor force outcomes in a developing country. A new road built in the Republic of Palau links formerly inaccessible rural areas to more urban wage sector employment. We use two censuses conducted five years apart which perfectly...

Traffic jams are an important problem both on an individual and on a societal level and much research has been done on trying to explain their emergence. The mainstream approach to road traffic monitoring is based on crowdsourcing roaming GPS devices such as cars or cell phones. These systems...

This paper quantifies the impacts of transport infrastructure investments on economic activity in Haiti, using satellite night-light luminosity as a proxy measure. Our identification strategy exploits the differential timing of rehabilitation projects across various road segments of the primary...

Reducing drink drive limits is generally regarded an effective strategy to save lives on the road. Using several new administrative data sources, we evaluate the effect of a stricter limit introduced in Scotland in 2014. This reduction had no effect on drink driving and road collisions....

We examine the impact of rural road connectivity on economic and social outcomes in the context of India’s PMGSY, the world’s largest rural road program. Using a novel village-level survey explicitly designed around PMGSY’s rollout, we exploit quasi-random variation in road placement to...

The United States witnessed an unprecedented crime wave in the second half of the twentieth century, with the total index crime rate more than tripling between 1960-1980. Little is known about the causes of this surge in criminal activity across the country. This paper investigates the role...

This paper builds on a previous paper by the authors (Kornfeld and Fraumeni, 2022) that primarily used U.S. Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics data to disaggregate investment in highways and streets into more detailed types to produce updated estimates of net wealth stocks and...