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Working Paper
Democracy to the road: the political economy of potholes
Are dictatorships more prone to build and maintain roads? This paper identifies a puzzling fact: countries that are more democratic tend to have roads in worse conditions than less democratic countries. Using lagged values of a democracy index to instrument for democracy in 1980 yields higher estimates of the magnitude of the association between democracy and bad roads. Instruments based on climate, population, and education yield similar results. The evidence points to a negative causal relationship from democracy to road quality. The author also finds that changes to a more democratic ...
Journal Article
Rush-hour horrors: how economics tackles congestion
Apart from environmental arguments, the best way to reduce traffic is to hit drivers in their pocketbooks.
Journal Article
Clearing the roadways: the case for congestion pricing
Journal Article
Venturing along the road less traveled: Virginia's experience with a private toll road
Private entrepreneurship is giving birth to new lanes of travel, but the labor is proving painful. Lessons learned from this experience should make the creation of private toll roads easier in the future.
Working Paper
Economic estimates of urban infrastructure needs
This paper, critical of commonly employed measures of capital spending needs, offers an alternative method for constructing needs estimates and tests the model using highway spending data for 10 midwestern urban counties.
Journal Article
Unlocking gridlock