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Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 16.
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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.
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 ...
Conference Paper
Highway infrastructure: policy issues for regions
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
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 ...