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on Transport Economics |
| By: | Pyddoke, Roger (Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)); Swärdh, Jan-Erik (Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute (VTI)) |
| Abstract: | This paper estimates the magnitudes of two hypothetical compensation schemes in 2030 if motor fuel prices increase successively to reduce CO2 emissions, with the goal of reaching Swedish policy goals for the transport sector by 2030. The two compensation schemes are examined in two price-increasing scenarios: the first, the ESR Scenario, is designed to fulfill the Swedish EU Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) commitments as of 2045; the second, the High Price Scenario, with larger price increases, is designed to reach the current Swedish national policy goal for the transport sector. These scenarios are compared with the Reference Scenario, in which the prices increase modestly, implying that the national policy goal is not reached for emissions from private cars, such that the government must instead purchase emission quotas to fulfill EU commitments. We estimate the effects on both fuel expenditure and welfare. Two levels of lump-sum transfers are made to vulnerable car owners in rural areas based on the mean fuel expenditure in each income octile. The results indicate that compensation can reduce average welfare losses from fuel price increases for rural car owners to a level similar to those of average car owners in large cities. Furthermore, the fiscal cost of these transfers is well below the public revenues from increased taxes, even when incorporating realistic administration costs. In the ESR Scenario, the low transfer amounts render it questionable whether compensation is justified. |
| Keywords: | Climate policy; fuel tax; car ownership; fuel consumption; income distribution; spatial distribution; compensation |
| JEL: | D31 H23 Q52 R12 R48 |
| Date: | 2026–10–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:vtiwps:2026_008 |
| By: | Giulia Brancaccio; Myrto Kalouptsidi; Theodore Papageorgiou; Yixin Zhou |
| Abstract: | Do transportation disruptions affect aggregate outcomes? We develop a tractable model of the transportation sector to study its impact on prices and international trade. By casting maritime transportation as a queueing network, the model identifies where the transportation bottlenecks lie and delivers a simple and easy-to compute measure of transportation capacity over time. We calibrate the model using shipping and trade data and use it to evaluate the resilience of the shipping sector during the last 20 years. During the Great Supply Chain Disruption, port bottlenecks raised commodity prices and caused shortages, but a contemporaneous contraction in commodity supply reduced shipping demand and thereby dampened these effects. By contrast, insufficient shipping capacity was a key driver of price increases during the 2000s Commodity Supercycle. |
| JEL: | E0 F0 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35812 |
| By: | Jeffrey Brinkman; Jeffrey Lin |
| Abstract: | We construct city-level measures of freeway disamenities and examine their association with metropolitan growth. We combine neighborhood-level estimates from Brinkman and Lin (2024) with calibrated spatial models for U.S. metropolitan areas. Each city measure is based on a counterfactual that removes estimated disamenities while holding modeled travel times fixed. Cities with larger estimated disamenities grew more slowly, conditioned on total freeway mileage and initial population. Total freeway mileage is positively associated with growth in the same specification. Estimated disamenities are larger in cities with greater 1950 populations, more centralized freeway networks, and coastal geography. These patterns are consistent with local quality-of-life costs attenuating regional access related growth benefits. |
| Keywords: | freeway disamenities; metropolitan growth; quantitative spatial model; transportation infrastructure; urban quality of life; Interstate Highway System |
| JEL: | R11 R12 R13 R23 R41 |
| Date: | 2026–10–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedpwp:103888 |
| By: | Xiwen Bai; Jesús Fernández-Villaverde; Yiliang Li; Ricardo Marto; Francesco Zanetti |
| Abstract: | We study the macroeconomic and trade-policy implications of disruptions to U.S.-bound shipping routes. Standard models treat them as iceberg-cost shocks, conflating the shock with the response to it. Using satellite vessel-tracking data, we construct route-level measures of potential and effective capacity for all U.S.-bound container ships from 2016 to 2025. Utilization losses in recent disruptions ran 20 to 40 percentage points, and began months before port congestion became visible. We embed these measures in a general equilibrium model in which firms reallocate a common fleet without internalizing the congestion they create and price above marginal cost, while importers' sourcing responds to route profitability. The reallocation triggered by a disruption then has first-order welfare effects, and the route's Domar weight is not a sufficient statistic for its welfare cost. The 2021 West Coast crisis and the 2023-2024 Red Sea attacks cost 0.69% and 0.35% of output. Naval protection of Red Sea shipping generated benefits of 0.04-0.08% of output at a fiscal cost of 0.02%. Tariffs decongest the routes they tax, offsetting or even reversing their conventional welfare cost. |
| JEL: | E23 F12 L91 R40 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35808 |
| By: | Bläser, Nikolaj (Dept. of People and Technology, Roskilde University); Magnussen, Búgvi Benjamin (Dept. of People and Technology, Roskilde University); Fuentes, Gabriel (Dept. of Business and Management Science, Norwegian School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | The tonne-mile metric serves as a measure to proxy demand for commodity transport in tramp shipping, yet predicting it is challenging due to complex trade route interdependencies and a dynamic geopolitical landscape. This study proposes a methodology for predicting tonne-miles based on trade flow modelling. Leveraging country-level export and import data, we frame tonne-mile estimation as a variant of the Minimum-Cost Flow Problem (MCFP) tailored towards tramp shipping and construct a time-expanded flow network that integrates multiple datasets to capture trade relationships. To evaluate the methodology, we perform a series of experiments across four key Clean Petroleum Product (CPP) commodities, demonstrating the ability of the model to reconstruct tonne-miles over a four-year historical period with a 2.1% Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Finally, we showcase our method’s utility as a decision-support tool by estimating future tonne-miles under several market scenarios utilising projected country-level export and import data. The framework can be used to estimate tonne-miles per commodity segment both regularly and during disruptions, such as geopolitical tensions. |
| Keywords: | Tonne-miles; Trade flow modelling; Tramp shipping; Minimumcost flow problem; Time-expanded flow network |
| JEL: | C44 C63 R40 |
| Date: | 2026–09–30 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhhfms:2026_013 |
| By: | Joan Calzada (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain); Néstor Duch-Brown (Joint Research Centre (JRC)); Xavier Fageda (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain); Nicandro Quirós (Universitat de Barcelona, Spain) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the impact of Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) redesign on web traffic to airline and flight comparison websites. Google implemented the redesign on March 6, 2024, in response to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The reform removed the Google Flights module from the main results page and introduced two new sections — “Airline Options” and “Flight Sites”— aimed at reducing self-preferencing and increasing the visibility of third-party services. Using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDiD) approach and domain-level data for four EU countries, with the United Kingdom and the United States as control markets, we estimate the causal effects of the redesign from November 2023 to December 2024. We find that the reform reallocated organic search traffic toward airline and comparison websites with smaller market shares. On desktop devices, organic traffic to low-cost and network airlines increased by 15 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively, while no significant effects are detected on mobile. Traffic to flight comparison websites increased by 20 percent on desktop and 19 percent on mobile, with gains concentrated among smaller platforms. By contrast, we find no detectable effects for large incumbents such as Skyscanner, Booking.com, and Expedia. Overall, the redesign relaxed visibility constraints for smaller market participants, suggesting that digital market regulation can increase contestability at the margin without necessarily altering the position of large incumbents. |
| Keywords: | Digital Markets Act; Self-preferencing; Google, SERP; Air Travel Market |
| JEL: | D40 L41 L86 L93 K21 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:net:wpaper:2604 |
| By: | Jaxa-rozen Marc (European Commission - JRC); Rózsai Máté (European Commission - JRC); Neuwahl Frederik (European Commission - JRC) |
| Abstract: | The climate targets of the European Union (EU) are defined in relation to historical benchmarks: for instance, the European Climate Law requires net domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be reduced by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990. However, for aviation and maritime transport, primary statistics on emissions are not available at the geographical detail needed to suitably track the contribution of international voyages to domestic emissions. To this end, a suitable calibration methodology was first published in 2024 as part of the Joint Research Centre’s Integrated Database of the European Energy System (JRC-IDEES), harmonizing available statistics to produce an internally consistent decomposition of activity, energy use, and emissions for aviation and maritime transport in the EU and European Economic Area (EEA). The present report documents the updated JRC-IDEES-2024 aviation and maritime methodology, which extends coverage with annual data for 1990-2024 and introduces new policy-relevant indicators such as emissions under the scope of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. The resulting open-access dataset matches Eurostat energy balances and distinguishes intra-/extra-EU and/or intra-/extra-EEA departures for each EU Member State, each EEA country, and the United Kingdom. As such, it is consistent with the scope of EU climate policies and can inform further research and decision-making. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc148005 |
| By: | Lion Hirth |
| Abstract: | Existing studies consistently find that home batteries and electric vehicles optimized against real-time electricity prices create new load peaks in local distribution grids, because all assets respond to the same price signal in sync. However, all but one of the 18 studies reviewed here treat wholesale prices as exogenous. This paper argues that treating prices as non-responsive biases the result: in reality, charging in low-price hours raises the wholesale price, which dampens the incentive to charge. I test this by simulating households with rooftop solar and home batteries under a spot-based retail tariff, calibrated to German data for 2025 with a model of equilibrium wholesale prices. With exogenous prices, my results confirm the finding from the previous literature: synchronous charging pushes the coincident import peak of the local grid to 83% above its no-battery level. With endogenous prices, the same fleet leaves the peak 6% below the no-battery benchmark. In other words, treating prices as endogenous reduces the coincident peak at high battery penetration nearly by half. This finding is robust across alternative price functions and exogenous price paths, different measures of the coincident peak, 25 scenario variations and three historical years. I conclude that new local peaks remain possible, particularly in grids where battery deployment runs ahead of the national average, but the risk and magnitude are considerably smaller than the existing literature suggests. |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2609.35111 |
| By: | Robin Braun; Maria D. Tito |
| Abstract: | Light vehicles (NAICS 33611) account for approximately 7 percent of U.S. merchandise goods imports, making it an economically significant trade category. Because motor vehicles also receive a sizable weight in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Import Price Index, changes in vehicle prices can materially influence overall import price inflation, making this sector particularly important for understanding broader trade price dynamics. |
| Date: | 2026–09–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfn:103842 |
| By: | Adrian Hamins-Puertolas; Maria D. Tito |
| Abstract: | The motor vehicle industry suffered severe production disruptions during 2021 and 2022, as semiconductor shortages—triggered by pandemic-era plant closures and shifting demand patterns—brought some assembly lines to a standstill. Having recovered to nearly pre-pandemic levels by the fourth quarter of 2020, aggregate U.S. light vehicle production plunged in early 2021, ultimately falling 20 percent below 2020:Q4 levels by the third quarter (figure 1). |
| Date: | 2026–09–28 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgfn:103841 |
| By: | Craig-Scheckman, Madeline; Keen, Trissanne; Zhang, Terry; Alavi, Sarasadat; Toman, Michael A. (Resources for the Future) |
| Abstract: | Lithium iron phosphate batteries are important for storing intermittent renewable electricity and powering electric vehicles. This report assesses the extent to which the battery supply chain can be “friendshored, ” now that clean energy tax credits are subject to stringent limits on involvement of “prohibited foreign entities.” This is not simply a matter of where materials are sourced: the regulated battery inputs also include manufacturing equipment, intellectual property, and technology licensing. The requirements are most problematic for the “midstream” segment of the supply chain—the processing of extracted critical minerals. “Upstream” (mineral extraction) and “downstream” (manufacture of battery components) inputs are less likely to be constrained. To be compliant, manufacturers must find new sources, scale up investment, and reduce dependence on technologies developed by prohibited foreign entities. Scenario analysis indicates that the supply chain is unlikely to be sufficiently friendshored before costly restrictions are triggered. Compliance timelines should reflect industrial realities in the sector. |
| Date: | 2026–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rff:report:rp-26-12 |