This study provides fresh evidence about the characteristics of technology and cost structure of public transit systems in Italy. The aim is to suggest useful guidelines for facing detected inefficiencies. The analysis is carried out through the estimation of a translog variable cost function....

The core of the present study is to analyse the cost efficiency of public transit systems in Italy, investigating the way subsidization mechanisms and network characteristics affect the x-inefficiency levels of firms. The analysis uses a seven-year (1993-1999) unbalanced panel of 45 Italian...

In the last decades transport activities persistently increased in the EU27 and were strongly coupled to growth in GDP. Like most production processes, they are inevitably linked with the generation of environmentally hazardous by-products, such as CO2 emissions. This leads to the question of...

Greenhouse gas emission reductions are at the centre of national and international efforts to mitigate climate change. In road transportation, many politically incentivised measures focus on increasing the energy efficiency of established technologies, or promoting electric or hybrid vehicles....

Transportation infrastructure is an exciting topic for public policy, private sector and the connection between them. This study deals with the impact of railways as hard type of transportation infrastructure on economic growth and population density. The purpose of this study is to search for...

In a recent work Nathan and Reddy (2011a) have proposed a Multi-view Black-box (MVBB) framework for development of sustainable development indicators (SDIs) for an urban setup. The framework is flexible to be applied to any domain or sector of urban system. In this paper the proposed MVBB...

Edgeworth price cycles refer to an asymmetric pattern of prices that result from a dynamic pricing equilibrium among competing oligopolists. The resulting time series takes on a sawtooth shape – many small price decreases interrupted only by occasional large price increases. Maskin and Tirole...

This paper investigates the role played by deregulation on firms’ investment decisions in infrastructure sectors. The analysis covers the period 1980-2006, which was characterised by increased liberalisation and privatisation across OECD countries. We assess the relationship of different...

We study the interaction between pricing, frequency of service and information provision by public transport firms offering scheduled services, and we do so under various regulatory regimes. The model assumes that users can come to the bus stop or rail station at random or they can plan their...

This article shows that in the presence of environmental externalities, it may be welfare enhancing to overcome a technological lock-in by a dead- end technology through governmental intervention. It is socially desirable to subsidize a dead-end technology if its environmental externality is...