Congestion Pricing paper du jour
2019-12-14 17:20:17.888615+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Abstract Economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficiency-enhancingsolution to traffic congestion, yet it has rarely been implemented because it is thought to create losers as well as winners. This paper uses survey and travel time data, combined with a structural model of traffic congestion, to estimate the joint distribution of agent preferences and evaluate the aggregate and distributional effects of road pricing. I find that adding tolls on half of the lanes of a highway yields a Pareto improvement. Further, the social welfare gains from doing so are substantial—up to $1,740 per road user per year.
JEL Classification: D62, H41, R41, R48.