Applied Microeconomics
Transportation & Urban Economics
Public Economics
Antitrust & Empirical IO
Environmental Economics
Health Economics
This paper examines the impact of airline mergers on overall airport connectivity. The analysis utilizes four centrality measures: Degree, Closeness, Eigenvector and Betweenness centralities, examined in both weighted and unweighted versions, capturing different dimensions of airport connectivity. Using the Synthetic Difference-in-Differences methodology, this study identifies causal effects of five airline mergers for both the short-run and long-run, with additional focus on various sub-groupings of airports whether based on size, centrality or pre-merger airline presence. The findings demonstrate heterogeneous effects across the multiple mergers and different centrality measures. While the America West-US Airways merger shows no significant impact on airport connectivity, other mergers exhibit mixed results ranging from largely negative effects, such as the Northwest-Delta merger, to generally positive effects, such as the Continental-United merger. Smaller and less central airports tend to experience larger effects, suggesting a disproportionate negative impact at these airports. These results have important implications for merger policy and regulatory oversight.
This paper explores the impact of parking prices on the decision to drive to work using a California household travel survey dataset and a discrete choice model. The paper tackles estimation challenges posed by insufficient parking information. The first challenge is the estimation of parking prices for those who do not drive, which is addressed by using a sample selection model. The second challenge is to understand the effect of the extent of the prevalence of Employer-Paid parking coupled with incentive programs offered in-lieu of parking. To address this challenge, two extreme scenarios are examined, and a range for the marginal effects of parking prices is estimated; one scenario assumes everyone receives Employer-Paid parking coupled with in-lieu of parking incentives, and the second assumes that no one is offered such incentives. The results suggest that higher parking prices reduce driving, regardless of the followed approach. It is estimated that a 10% increase in parking prices leads to a 1 - 2 percentage point decline in the probability of driving to work. This range varies with initial parking prices, where the lower end of the range increases at a decreasing rate, and the higher end peaks at $2.5 and decreases with higher prices. Moreover, there seems to be no evidence of sample selection bias. The evidence confirms that parking pricing can indeed be an effective transportation demand management tool.
(with Betty Krier, Joao Macieira, Jerrod Sharpe and Brad Shrago)
(with an aviation audit team)
This paper examines the impact of a number of fundamental determinants of commute mode choice on transit use, and explores the role of social influence. The determinants explored cover socioeconomic characteristics, built environment and neighborhood characteristics, transit accessibility, and trip characteristics. Social interactions have been found to affect many of the decisions of economic agents, and are likely to play a role in the decision to use transit. A unique dataset is built to conduct this analysis across a number of major US cities, and examine the effects in both the residence and workplace neighborhoods, where a neighborhood is defined as a census tract. Social influence is explored across 3 different dimensions: space (neighborhood), income, and race. A novel instrumental variable is constructed to identify spatial social influence, and an alternative identification strategy is devised to identify the income-group and racial social influence. The evidence suggests that spatial social influence exists among both coworkers and residential neighbors, and that peer effects among coworkers are larger than those among residential neighbors. Moreover, income-group social influence, among both coworkers and residential neighbors, plays a significant role in the rich commuter's decision to use transit. However, racial social influence does not affect a commuter's decision to use transit, regardless of race.
(In collaboration with Sofia Franco)
We examine the joint role of parking prices, parking availability, and urban form, in commute mode choice in Los Angeles county using a travel survey and two unique parking datasets. We explore how these factors affect the decision to drive and then expand the analysis to a multinomial context. The results indicate that a 10% increase in parking prices is associated with a 1.1% drop in the probability of driving to work. Residential on-street and off-street parking, and workplace urban form, significantly affect commute mode choices. These findings have important implications for parking pricing, minimum parking requirements, and employer-paid parking.
(In collaboration with Joao Macieira)