The recent economic downturn took a severe toll on the aviation industry, leading to a significant contraction in air transport demand. In spite of that, airports' operating costs did not mirror the declining traffic trends and continued to increase during the same period. This paper sought to...

Airport pricing is a central issue in international transport policies, which tend to support pricing schemes based on marginal operating costs. This paper aims to provide empirical evidence in support of increased differentiation in airport charges on the basis of marginal passenger costs being...

The econometric estimation of cost functions has been proposed in the literature as a suitable approach in order to obtain estimations of marginal costs, efficiency levels and scale elasticities for transport industries. However, regarding the airport industry, no significant attention has been...

The recent economic downturn led to a significant contraction in the global demand for air travel and cargo. In spite of that, airports’ operating costs did not mirror the traffic trends and kept increasing during the same period, showing evident signs of lack of flexibility. With this...

In a context of debate over the future of the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) funding model, this paper revisits the current system of airport classification used for the allocation of public funding for capacity developments. Previous papers have already addressed the limitations of...

Purpose – When large samples are used to estimate airport efficiency, clustering is a necessary step before carrying out any benchmarking analysis. However, the existing literature has paid little attention to developing a robust methodology for airport classification, instead relying on ad...