Many transportation policies indirectly affect vehicle travel and resulting externalities by inducing changes in vehicle scrappage rates. We leverage the staggered removal of state-level safety inspection programs across the United States within an instrumental variables (IV) framework to...

Pigouvian taxes and user fees can address environmental externalities and efficiently fund transportation infrastructure, but these policies may place burdens on poorer households. This paper presents new evidence on the distributional consequences of the gasoline tax, bus and light rail charges...

More stringent fuel economy standards and increased market penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) present challenges to federal policy makers who historically have relied on motor vehicle fuel excise taxes to fund highway projects. This paper considers the distributional implications of a...

In 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that sought to repeal state gasoline taxes and vehicle fees enacted as part of the 2017 Road Repair and Accountability Act. We study the relationship between support for the proposition, political ideology and the economic...

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The "synthetic control" is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit's pre-treatment outcomes and other covariates as closely as...

We use a field experiment to measure the effectiveness of financial incentives and moral suasion "nudges" to shift the timing of electric vehicle (EV) charging. We find EV owners respond strongly to financial incentives, while nudges have no statistically discernible effect. When financial...

Designing public transport networks involves tradeoffs between extensive geographic coverage, frequent service on each route, and relying on interconnections as opposed to direct service. These choices, in turn, depend on individual preferences for waiting times, travel times, and transfers. We...

Price theory says that the most important effects of policy and technological change are often found beyond their first point of contact. This appears opposed to econometric methods that rule out spillovers of one person's treatment on another's outcomes. This paper uses the industry model from...

Recent work shows that popular partially-linear regression specifications can put negative weights on some treatment effects, potentially producing incorrectly-signed estimands. We counter by showing that negative weights are no problem in design-based specifications, in which low-dimensional...

Many studies in economics use instruments or treatments which combine a set of exogenous shocks with other predetermined variables by a known formula. Examples include shift-share instruments and measures of social or spatial spillovers. We review recent econometric tools for this setting, which...