In Europe, company cars are offered by employers as fringe benefits to their employees at a lower price than employees pay in the car market, mainly due to favourable taxation of company cars. We analyse the welfare effects of favourable taxation of company cars for the Netherlands. The...

The ‘backhaul problem’ is characterized by an imbalance in transport flows between locations. This problem is usually studied in a perfectly competitive framework, which essentially predicts that when the imbalance is sufficiently large, the freight price of transport from low demand regions...

In this paper we study how congestion and residential movingbehaviour are interrelated using a two-region job search model. Workerschoose optimally between interregional commuting and residential movingto live closer to the place of work. This choice affects the external costs ofcommuting due to...

In this paper, we derive a structural model for commuting speed. We presumethat commuting speed is chosen to minimise commuting costs, which encompass bothmonetary and time costs. At faster speed levels, the monetary costs increase, but the timecosts fall. Using data from Great Britain, we...

This paper investigates the welfare effect of adverse weather through changes in the speed of individuals’ car commuting trips in the entire Netherlands. Weather measurements are local and time specific (hourly basis). As most commuters travel twice a day between home and work, we are able to...

According to economic theory, imbalances in trade flows affect transport prices because (some) carriers have to return without cargo from the low demand region to the high demand region. Therefore, transport prices in the high demand direction have to exceed those in the low demand direction....

It has been argued that urban planning policies, through minimum parking requirements, and income tax policies induce free employer parking. We show that tax policies induce welfare losses in the order of 12% of parking resource costs, implying an annual deadweight loss in the order of € 5...

A new paradigm for transport economists has been established: revenues of a welfare-maximising road tax should be employed to reduce the level of a distortionary income tax. An essential assumption to reach this conclusion is that the number of workdays is optimally chosen, whereas daily...

The literature on car cruising is dominated by theory. This is the first article thatexamines cruising for parking using a nation-wide random sample of car trips. We excludeemployer-provided and residential parking. We demonstrate that cruising time is, on average, 36seconds per car trip. Car...

We estimate welfare losses of policies that provide on-street parking permits to residents almost free of charge in shopping districts. Our empirical results indicate that parking supply is far from perfectly price elastic, implying that there are substantial welfare losses related to...