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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
Noteworthy: transportation: Texas highway investment falls short
Journal Article
Highway grants: roads to prosperity?
Federal highway grants to states appear to boost economic activity in the short and medium term. The short-term effects appear to be due largely to increases in aggregate demand. Medium-term effects apparently reflect the increased productive capacity brought by improved roads. Overall, each dollar of federal highway grants received by a state raises that state?s annual economic output by at least two dollars, a relatively large multiplier.
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.
Working Paper
Are State Governments Roadblocks to Federal Stimulus? Evidence on the Flypaper Effect of Highway Grants in the 2009 Recovery Act
We examine how state governments adjusted spending in response to the large temporary increase in federal grants under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). We concentrate our analysis on ARRA highway grants, which were especially likely to crowd out states? own highway funding given the lack of matching requirements and according to past research on federal highway grants. The mechanism used to apportion ARRA highway grants to states allows us to isolate exogenous changes in these grants. In addition, we show that the original 1944 proposed layout of the interstate highway ...
Journal Article
On the road to Singapore
Journal Article
Unlocking gridlock
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.