Using the 2012-2018 waves of the China Family Panel Studies, we investigate the impact of energy poverty (EP) on subjective well-being (SWB) among Chinese adults aged 18 and over. In addition to documenting EP rates in the range of 13.2% to 35.3% (dependent on measurement used), we show that EP...

China’s Belt and Road Initiative was introduced in 2013 to revitalise the Silk Road and promote economic development and integration. This paper investigates the economic effects of the opening of the only high-speed rail (HSR) line in northwest China which connects China’s northwestern...

The focus of this study is to assess the causal impact of the connection of a local area to a high-speed rail network (HSR) on firms' total factor productivity (TFP). The quasi-random location of the HSR station in the Italian city of Reggio Emilia is exploited in a Difference-in Differences...

Airline fuel consumption is costly for the firms and for society as well due to a climate-change externality. We study how fuel price changes affect cost-minimizing choices by airlines that have implications for the extent of this externality. The airline industry's capital stock can be easily...

"Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940's and 1950's, the trucking industry today appears to be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivity advances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are due simply to...

Using evidence from recent work on truckers and disaggregated older data prior researchers did not have, we revisit a classic topic and find some new answers. We focus on differentials in average annual earnings at the firm level among mileage-paid over-the-road tractor-trailer drivers ("road...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

Using CPS data for the period 1979-2009, the wage dispersion of truck drivers (and subsets of the truck driving sample) is compared to the trends in wage dispersion of males economy-wide. We find that truckers' wages experienced a decrease in inequality post-deregulation, as expected given the...

How do truck drivers perceive the risk they face from automation and their opportunities to retrain for employment in a different occupation? Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology has made rapid progress in recent years, so these questions are likely salient to truckers. Based on surveys of the new...

Combining weekly productivity data with weekly productivity beliefs for a large sample of truckers over two years, we show that workers tend to systematically and persistently over-predict their productivity. If workers are overconfident about their own productivity at the current firm relative...