Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s proposal to make the United States a “world leader” in high‐​speed rail would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt for construction of new rail lines plus tens of billions of dollars of annual deficit spending to subsidize operating...

This paper studies road safety and accident externalities when insurance companies have market power, and can influence road users' driving behaviour via insurance premiums. We obtain both welfare and profit maximizing marginal conditions for first- and second-best insurance premiums for...

Non-exposed space is defined relative to exposed space, and mostly refers to indoor or semi-indoor scenes, such as urban rail transit, tunnels, coal mines, factories, shopping malls, hospitals, etc. Navigation and location information are closely related to human production and life. No matter...

Dense urban areas are especially hardly hit by the COVID-19 crisis due to the limited availability of public transport, one of the most efficient means of mass mobility. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, public transport operators are experiencing steep declines in demand and fare revenues due...

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that landed elites may block technological change and economic development if they fear that they will lose future political power (Acemoglu and Robinson (2002, 2006, and 2012). It exploits a plausible exogenous change in the distribution of political...

We analyze investment decisions when information is costly, with and without delegation to an agent. We use a rational-inattention model and compare it with a canonical signal-extraction model. We identify three "investment conditions". In "sour" conditions, no information is acquired and no...

Today, evolving technologies have enabled scientific breakthroughs in innovative wind turbine designs, including taller wind turbine towers and longer blades. These breakthroughs will enable utility-scale wind turbines to reach higher into the atmosphere, access stronger winds, and produce...

Transport is the only sector in the EU in which greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. This paper uses the FTT (future technology transformation) framework to project energy use and emissions from passenger cars in the EU 27 until 2050. Projections are made based on four policy scenarios in...

Duties and taxes on cars are an important source of revenue for European governments and the tax systems are also designed with the goal of achieving environmental policy objectives. A systematic and quantitative comparison of passenger car taxation in 30 European countries shows significant...

The fuel efficiency of conventional private vehicles is a key input in the design of several economic and environmental policies. Reliable projections of the fuel efficiency variable can improve estimates on the future emission savings from policies promoting vehicle replacement, and on future...