【AEW Webinar】Efficiency and Equity Impacts of Urban Transportation Policies with Equilibrium Sorting

---

• 研討會日期 : 2024-06-06
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Shanjun Li
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Shanjun Li received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 2007. He is currently a Professor of Applied Economics and Policy at Cornell University. His research areas include environmental and energy economics, urban and transportation economics, empirical industrial organization, and Chinese economy. His recent research examines pressing sustainability issues in China and their global implications in order to inform evidence-based policymaking.
• 演講摘要 : We estimate an equilibrium sorting model of housing location and commuting mode choice with endogenous traffic congestion to evaluate urban transportation policies. Leveraging fine-scale data from travel diaries and housing transactions identifying residents’ home and work locations, we recover rich preference heterogeneity over both travel mode and residential location decisions. While different policies produce the same congestion reduction, their impacts on social welfare differ drastically. In addition, sorting undermines the congestion reduction under driving restrictions and subway expansion but strengthens it under congestion pricing. The combination of congestion pricing and subway expansion delivers the greatest congestion relief and efficiency gains.
• Working Paper Title : Airlines, Pollution, and Fertility
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Xinming Du received her Ph.D. from the Sustainable Development program at Columbia University in 2023. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. Her research areas are Environmental Economics, Applied Microeconomics, and Digital Economy.
• Working Paper Abstract : This paper introduces a new instrument for air pollution derived from the global airline network. Pollution is persistently elevated beneath overhead flight routes along gradients otherwise uncorrelated with pollution. We combine this cross-sectional variation with the launch of new flight routes to estimate the impacts of pollution on health across the world. We establish several findings. First, PM2.5 has adverse impacts on infant health via lower birth weights, including in 44 developing countries where data is scarce. Second, we leverage the fact that propeller planes still use leaded fuel to show that 1ng/m3 ambient lead reduces fertility rate by 0.15%. Third, we generalize this in relation to the historical phase-out of leaded fuel in vehicles, which our analysis suggests added over 2 million people per year to the global population—making it among the most material public health interventions. This paper demonstrates a large but little-known negative externality of the aviation industry. We provide this global gridded airline data product for use in future research.