In countries, such as Singapore, that have implemented vehicle congestion policies, recent years have seen a shift towards motor vehicle taxes based on car use. Ownership taxes reduce the number of cars on the road, leaving the price per trip largely unaffected. Use taxes such as fuel taxes and...

Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore a complementary measure of congestion costs based on self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation in daily...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...

We propose a theory-inspired measure of the accessibility of a city's center: the size of the surrounding area from which it can be reached within a specific time. Using publicly available optimal-routing software, we compute these "accessibility zones" for the 109 largest US and European...

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the...

The Inca Empire was the last of a long series of highly developed cultures in pre-colonial South America. It stretched across parts of the current territories of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and the whole of Peru. The Inca Road was its 30,000-kilometer-long transportation system....

Armenia has already signed some agreements with China to participate in the BRI project while no concrete measures are financed by the initiative. But what are the economic advantages and disadvantages of the BRI? While funding of some for Western financiers unattractive projects by China is a...

The BRI initiative presents a colossal opportunity for landlocked Kazakhstan to become a central logistics hub. However, this prospect is overshadowed by geopolitical risks that have escalated since the beginning of 2022. The Ukrainian crisis increased geopolitical tensions on the Eurasian...

Georgia's railway network is a key segment of the TRACECA, the shortest route from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Basin. Georgian Railway Corridor has a number of advantages over pipeline, alternative railways and auto transport. Changing the quality of...

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...