Following market liberalisation, the vehicle population in China has increased dramatically over the past few decades. This paper examines the causal impact of the opening of a heavily used high speed rail line connecting two megacities in China in 2015, Chengdu and Chongqing, on air pollution....

Mirroring the railroad industry of the 1940’s and 1950’s, the trucking industry today appearsto be achieving impressive productivity gains. But it is easy to confuse true productivityadvances in transportation industries with changes in ton-miles per unit of input that are duesimply to changes...

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...

Employee referrals are a very common means by which firms hire new workers. Past work suggests that workers hired via referrals often perform better than non-referred workers, but we have little understanding as to why. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is primarily because referrals allow...

In New York City (NYC), it has been a common complaint that it is difficult to find a taxi in the rain. Using all Uber rides in NYC from April to September 2014 and January to June 2015, we show that the number of Uber rides is significantly correlated with whether it rained. The number of Uber...

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive...

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...

After a period of regulatory changes in the early 1980s we are faced with "new" freight transportation labor markets in the U.S. Using data from the 1984-1999 Current Population Survey, we examine trends in the wages of workers within freight transportation, with a focus on wage differentials...

Every year, approximately 27% of all jobs in the U.S. truck transportation sector (NAICS 484) are reshuffled across motor carriers as existing carriers grow or shrink, new entrants begin operations, and existing firms exit. Studying how these dynamics unfold, especially for young carriers, is...