Numerous countries have attempted to improve the performance of their railways by introducing more competition, but there is fierce debate and no consensus on how this is best achieved. This book reveals how railways were an obvious target for reform because they were often losing traffic and...

Alfred Kahn was a major force behind regulatory reform that initially benefited air travelers and subsequently consumers in other industries by placing greater reliance on markets than on regulators to allocate resources. Kahn also believed that effective governance was important for...

We assess the welfare effects of highway privatization accounting for government's behavior in setting the sale price, firms' strategic behavior in setting tolls, and motorists' heterogeneous preferences for speedy and reliable travel. We find motorists are able to benefit from privatization by...

Consumers and firms spend some $200 billion annually on legal services, but little is known about the factors that influence lawyers’ prices for those services. In this paper, we explore the determinants of the variation in lawyers’ pricing to shed light on competition among lawyers and to...

Travelers and airlines are frustrated by long and costly travel delays at public airports that are attributable to runway charges that do not account for aircraft congestion. Because the inefficient charges are likely to persist, we explore whether private airport competition could lead to more...

Recent econometric advances have made it possible to empirically identify the varied nature of consumers' preferences. We apply these advances to study commuters' preferences for speedy and reliable highway travel with the objective of exploring efficiency and distributional effects of road...

The United States has negotiated bilateral open skies agreements to deregulate airline competition on US international routes, but little is known about their effects on travelers' welfare and the gains from the US negotiating agreements with more countries. We develop a model of international...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest how the U.S. experience with deregulating its intercity transportation system can identify important considerations for all countries that wish to pursue privatization. Transportation deregulation in the United States gave private railroad, trucking, bus,...

This paper offers a perspective on paying for and investing in the transportation infrastructure. The following example illustrates the need to move away from the current national mind set. Pick any pothole-laden, congested two-lane road in an urban area. Suppose public funds are used to widen...