CAN TOLLING HELP EVERYONE? ESTIMATING THE AGGREGATE AND DISTRIBUTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF CONGESTION PRICING

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hall, Jonathan D.
• 署名单位: University of Toronto
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1093/jeea/jvz082
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 441-474
• 关键词: road traffic congestion; travel-time; urban; bottleneck; PRIVATE; MODEL; cost; GOVERNMENT; ECONOMICS; resource

摘要

Economists have long advocated road pricing as an efficiency-enhancing solution to traffic congestion, yet it has rarely been implemented because it is thought to create losers as well as winners. In theory, a judiciously designed toll applied to a portion of the lanes of a highway can generate a Pareto improvement, even before using the toll revenue. This paper explores the practical relevance of this theoretical possibility by using survey and travel time data, combined with a structural model of traffic congestion, to estimate the joint distribution of agent preferences over three dimensions-value of time, schedule inflexibility, and desired arrival time-and evaluate the effects of adding optimal time-varying tolls. 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.