This study presents new evidence on the causal impact of transport infrastructure on the economy. In China, inventory has declined over recent decades, while the country’s road infrastructure has expanded rapidly. Building on the existing literature, we introduce new approaches, including a...

This paper presents an alternative approach for analyzing the relationship between land use and traffic congestion by employing the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD). The MFD is an empirically observed relationship between traffic flow and traffic density at the level of an urban region,...

Engineering studies demonstrate that traffic in dense downtown areas obeys a stable functional relationship between average speed and density, including a region of ‘hypercongestion’, where flow decreases with density. This situation can be described as queuing behind a bottleneck whose...

We estimate the effects of highways on the suburbanization of Spanish cities. Based on Spain’s historical roads – the almost 2000years old Roman roads and the 1760 Bourbon roads –, we rely on an instrumental variables (IV) strategy because of the endogeneity of highway provision. Our...

In this paper, we use a simple majority voting model to study the introduction of urban congestion tolls. The model allows for different types of uncertainty and considers different uses of the toll revenues. The following results are obtained. First, we show that individual uncertainty with...

This paper considers the second-best policy problem that arises when auto travel is priced below its marginal cost and there is a substitute mass transit mode. Using analytical methods, a global comparison is made between the second-best levels of transit service and the fare and their...

I study delays and congestion patterns in US hub airports during periods of high flight volume. I find that these periods are longer when the share of flights operated by the hub airline is greater, and these longer periods exhibit shorter delays. These results lend support to recent theoretical...

Urban congestion causes travel times to exhibit considerable variability, which leads to coordination problems when people have to meet. We analyze a game for the timing of a meeting between two players who must each complete a trip of random duration to reach the meeting, which does not begin...

I investigate the effect of improvements to the transportation infrastructure on changes in location patterns of population in Barcelona, Spain between 1991 and 2006. At a census tract level, I verify and extend the finding of Baum-Snow (2007a) that transportation improvements cause...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the role of air services. This paper exploits the large and swift changes to air traffic induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to identify the link between air traffic and...