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on Transport Economics |
| By: | Tanaka, Kiyoyasu; Tsubota, Kenmei |
| Abstract: | By analyzing a comprehensive dataset on transport transactions in Japan, we describe a directional imbalance in freight rates by transport mode and examine its potential sources, such as economies of density and directionally imbalanced transport flow. There are certain numbers of observed links which show asymmetric transport costs. Instrumental variable analysis is used to show that economies of density account for deviation from symmetric freight rates between prefectures. Our results show that a 10% increase in outbound transport flow relative to inbound transport flow leads to a 2.1% decrease in outbound freight rate relative to inbound freight rate. |
| Keywords: | Japan, Transportation, Costs, Economic geography, Freight rates, Directional imbalance, Economies of density |
| JEL: | F14 L91 R41 |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jet:dpaper:dpaper441&r=tre |
| By: | JANSSENS, Jochen; VAN DEN BERGH, Joos; SÖRENSEN, Kenneth; CATTRYSSE, Dirk |
| Abstract: | Distribution companies that serve a very large number of customers, courier companies for example, often partition the geographical region served by a depot into zones. Each zone is assigned to a single vehicle and each vehicle serves a single zone. An alternative approach is to partition the distribution region into smaller microzones that are assigned to a preferred vehicle in a so-called tactical plan. When the workload in each microzone is known, the microzones can be reassigned to vehicles in such a way that the total distance traveled is minimized, the workload of the different vehicles is balanced, and as many microzones as possible are assigned to their preferred vehicle. In this paper we model the resulting microzone-based vehicle routing problem as a multi-objective optimization problem and develop a simple yet effective algorithm to solve it. We analyze this algorithm and discuss the results that it obtains. |
| Keywords: | Variable neighborhood tabu search, Workload balancing, Metaheuristics, Multi-objective optimization, Vehicle routing, Courier companies |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ant:wpaper:2014002&r=tre |
| By: | Matthew Ryan (The University of Auckland); Flávio Menezes (School of Economics, The University of Queensland) |
| Abstract: | This paper models a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to construct a highway. It captures some of the key features of the Transmission Gully PPP. The winner of the tender recovers its costs (including capital costs) via an availability payment rather than toll revenue. While the availability payment eliminates demand risk, the winner of the tender faces cost risk: maintenance costs are only learned after construction is complete. The winning firm can make investments during the construction phase that reduce subsequent maintenance costs. As the government faces transaction costs to replace the successful bidder, firms use debt strategically to pass on some of the cost risk to the government. This distorts incentives to invest in maintenance cost reduction. Private financing therefore undermines some of the benefits from bundling construction and maintenance, which is often mentioned as an important advantage of PPPs. |
| Date: | 2014–02–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qld:uq2004:499&r=tre |
| By: | Lindo, Jason M. (Texas A&M University); Siminski, Peter (University of Wollongong); Yerokhin, Oleg (University of Wollongong) |
| Abstract: | A large literature has documented significant public health benefits associated with the minimum legal drinking age in the United States, particularly because of the resulting effects on motor vehicle accidents. These benefits form the primary basis for continued efforts to restrict youth access to alcohol. It is important to keep in mind, though, that policymakers have a wide variety of alcohol-control options available to them, and understanding how these policies may complement or substitute for one another can improve policy making moving forward. Towards this end, we propose that investigating the causal effects of the minimum legal drinking age in New South Wales, Australia provides a particularly informative case study, because Australian states are among the world leaders in their efforts against drunk driving. Using an age-based regression-discontinuity design applied to restricted-use data from several sources, we find no evidence that legal access to alcohol has effects on motor vehicle accidents of any type in New South Wales, despite having large effects on drinking and on hospitalizations due to alcohol abuse. |
| Keywords: | health, alcohol, minimum legal drinking age, drunk driving |
| JEL: | I18 K32 |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7930&r=tre |
| By: | Simanti Bandyopadhyay (National Institute of Public Finance and Policy); Debraj Bagchi (Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability) |
| Abstract: | The Commissioner of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) had recommended certain measures in December 2011 to improve the revenues of the corporation and thereby narrow the existing budget gap. These included introduction of congestion and conservancy charges and revision of rates for parking fees, one time parking charges, fees from mobile towers and property taxes, thus mainly focusing on the augmentation of the non-tax revenues. However, due to social resistance and lack of political will, none of these recommendations were implemented. In this paper we have attempted to quantify the potential revenue gains that may have resulted had the recommendations been accepted. Through a simple simulation based analysis, we find that with the implementation of the recommendations, increases in the own revenues could be between 10 per cent to 21 per cent while that in total revenue could be between 7 per cent to 15 per cent. We also find that with the reccommendations being implemented, own revenues would be able to cover about 77 per cent to 85 per cent of the revenue expenditure and total revenues would be able to account for about 74 per cent to 80 per cent of the total expenditure. Further, the share of non tax revenues in the total revenues would also rise which suggests that the corporation would be in a better position to exploit its potential for non tax revenues and move towards greater self reliance with lesser dependence on tax revenues. Finally, we find that the major share of gains would come from ‘one time parking charges’ followed by property taxes and other components. |
| Keywords: | Urban Finance, User Charges, Property Tax, Revenue Potential, Expenditure Requirements, Service Delivery. |
| Date: | 2013–12–18 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper1326&r=tre |
| By: | Adrian Beck; Rudolf Kerschbamer; Jianying Qiu; Matthias Sutter |
| Abstract: | Credence goods, such as car repairs or medical services, are characterized by severe informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers, leading to fraud in the form of provision of insufficient service (undertreatment), provision of unnecessary service (overtreatment) and charging too much for a given service (overcharging). Recent experimental research involving a standard (student) subject pool has examined the influence of informational and market conditions on the type and level of fraud. We investigate whether professional car mechanics – as real sellers of credence goods – react in the same way to changes in informational and institutional constraints. While we find qualitatively similar effects in the fraud dimensions of undertreatment and overcharging for both subject pools, car mechanics are significantly more prone to supplying unnecessary services in all conditions, which could be a result of decision heuristics they learned in their professional training. |
| Keywords: | Artefactual field experiment, car mechanics, credence goods |
| JEL: | C91 D82 C72 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2014/02&r=tre |
| By: | Srour, F.J.; Agatz, N.A.H.; Oppen, J. |
| Abstract: | We examine different routing strategies to cope with inaccurate time window in- formation in the context of a dynamic pick-up and delivery problem with time windows. Our experiments show that advance information, even if inaccurate, can provide benefits from a planning perspective. We propose a novel stochastic strategy that consistently performs well compared to several benchmark strategies. |
| Keywords: | routing, value of information, dynamic pick-up and delivery problem with time windows, multiple scenario analysis |
| Date: | 2014–01–27 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ems:eureri:50394&r=tre |