Road maintenance constitutes a significant component of public transportation spending at all levels of government. Formulation of efficient transportation infrastructure policy requires information about factors affecting road and traffic conditions. We generate the first causal evidence that...

Penology in the Jim Crow South centered on the chain gang. Gangs ostensibly served three purposes: their severity served as a deterrent; their putting convicts to work on roads and other public improvements reduced the taxpayers' costs of infrastructure; and their discriminatory implementation...

Infrastructure costs in the United States are high and rising. The procurement process is one potential cost driver. In this paper we conduct a survey of procurement practices across the 50 states. We survey both employees at each state department of transportation (DOT) and the road builders...

Which Americans experience the worst infrastructure? What are the costs of living with that infrastructure? We measure road roughness throughout America using vertical acceleration data from Uber rides across millions of American roads. Our measure correlates strongly and positively with other...

Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these...

I generate new data on HIV incidence and prevalence in Africa based on inference from mortality rates. I use these data to relate economic activity (specifically, exports) to new HIV infections in Africa and argue there is a significant and large positive relationship between the two: a doubling...

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural" selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the pre-deregulation level of" leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged" carriers are less...

This paper quantifies the value of US highways and their contribution in shaping regional specialization patterns and facilitating internal and external market integration. We develop a multisector general equilibrium model of interregional and international trade with many locations in the...

The importance of increments to an existing highway system depends upon their contributions to the accessibility provided by the existing network. Nearly 40 years ago, Mohring [1965] suggested this logic for planning optimal highway investment programs. He argued it could be implemented by...

A large fraction of Uganda's population continues to earn a living from quasi-subsistence agriculture. This paper uses a static general equilibrium model to explore the relationships between high transportation costs, low productivity, and the size of the quasi-subsistence sector. We...