|
on Transport Economics |
| By: | Glaeser, Edward L; Ponzetto, Giacomo AM |
| Abstract: | Will politics lead to over-building or under-building of transportation projects? In this paper, we develop a model of infrastructure policy in which politicians overdo things that have hidden costs and underperform tasks whose costs voters readily perceive. Consequently, national funding of transportation leads to overspending, since voters more readily perceive the upside of new projects than the future taxes that will be paid for distant highways. Yet when local voters are well-informed, the highly salient nuisances of local construction, including land taking and noise, lead to under-building. This framework explains the decline of urban mega-projects in the US (Altshuler and Luberoff 2003) as the result of increasingly educated and organized urban voters. Our framework also predicts more per capita transportation spending in low-density and less educated areas, which seems to be empirically correct. |
| Keywords: | elections; imperfect information; infrastructure; Nuisance mitigation; political economy; Transportation investment |
| JEL: | D72 D82 H54 H76 R42 R53 |
| Date: | 2017–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12207&r=tre |
| By: | Martin Wiegand (VU Amsterdam); Eric Koomen (VU Amsterdam); Menno (M.) Pradhan (VU Amsterdam; University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Tinbergen Institute, The Netherlands); Christopher Edmonds (Tokyo International University) |
| Abstract: | In this paper we estimate the impact of road development on household welfare in rural Papua New Guinea over the period between 1996 and 2010, using two cross-sectional household surveys and corresponding road maps. To deal with endogenous placement of road infrastructure programs we employ a correlated random effects model that corrects for location-specific changes in road quality. We also use a newly developed quantile regression method to investigate whether road works are pro-poor. Estimates show that investments in sealing roads to nearest towns led to higher consumption levels and housing quality, and to less reliance on subsistence farming. Effects are stronger among poor, less educated, and female-led households. |
| Keywords: | roads; infrastructure; impact evaluation; household welfare; developing country; Papua New Guinea |
| JEL: | H54 O18 |
| Date: | 2017–08–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20170076&r=tre |
| By: | Adriaan (A.R.) Soetevent (University of Groningen, The Netherlands; Tinbergen Institute, The Netherlands); Gert-Jan Romensen (University of Groningen, The Netherlands;) |
| Abstract: | How to engage workers in conservation efforts when the company pays the bill? In a field experiment with 409 bus drivers, we investigate the potential of targeted peer-comparison feedback and on-the-road coaching. Drivers receive individualized reports with peer-comparison messages on multiple driving dimensions. In addition, coaches quasi randomly provide drivers with in person coaching moments on the bus. Based on 800,000 trip-level observations, we find that the targeted peer-comparison treatments do not improve driving. On-the-road coaching significantly improves driving on multiple dimensions but only temporarily. Further analysis reveals negative interaction effects between the two programs. |
| Keywords: | peer comparisons; coaching; worker motivation; fuel conservation |
| JEL: | D2 M5 Q5 |
| Date: | 2017–08–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20170073&r=tre |
| By: | Visser, T.R.; Spliet, R. |
| Abstract: | In this paper we introduce several new methods for eciently evaluating moves in neighborhood search heuristics for routing problems with time-dependent travel times. We consider both the case that route duration is constrained and the case that route duration appears in the objective. We observe that the composition of piecewise linear functions can be evaluated in various orders when computing the route duration. We use this to develop a new tree based data structure to improve the complexity of computations and memory usage. This also allows us to present methods that have the best known computational complexity, while they do not even require a lexicographic order of search. Our numerical experiments illustrate the trade-o between computation time and memory usage among the dierent methods. On 1000 customer instances, our methods are able to speed-up a construction heuristic by up to 8.89 times and an exchange neighborhood improvement heuristic by up to 3.94 times, without requiring excessive amounts of memory. |
| Keywords: | Vehicle Routing Problems, Neighborhood Search, Feasibility Check, Time-dependent Travel, Times, First-in-first-out, Duration constraints |
| Date: | 2017–08–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ems:eureir:100852&r=tre |
| By: | Taasim, Shairil; yusoff, remali |
| Abstract: | This study investigates the causal relations between passenger movement handled by Malaysia airports and economic growth per capita from 1990 to 2015 by using co-integration approach, Granger causality and vector autoregression (VAR) model. By applying time series analysis, we explored whether the two variables lead each other to Malaysia’s economic growth. The result showed that both variables integrated to enhance Malaysia’s economic performance. |
| Keywords: | Granger, Airports, Co-Integration, GDP per capita |
| JEL: | O2 O21 |
| Date: | 2017–01–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:80733&r=tre |