Economics of Transportation in the 21st Century
Call for Proposals
To promote research in transportation economics and to strengthen the economic basis for designing transportation policy in the 21st century, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), with the generous support of the Department of Transportation (DOT), is carrying out a multi-year research initiative on “Transportation Economics in the 21st Century.” This initiative is led by NBER researchers Edward Glaeser of Harvard University, James Poterba of MIT, and Stephen Redding of Princeton University. The initiative is now beginning its second year. It is designed to bring together researchers in various subfields of economics -- energy economics, industrial organization, macroeconomics, environmental economics, regional and urban economics, regulatory economics, and public finance, as well as transportation economics -- to study issues of current importance and to frame the agenda for future research.
For the 2020-21 academic year, the initiative will support five projects on the economics of the U.S. transportation sector. Potential research topics might include, but are not limited to:
* The returns to, and financing of, investments in transportation infrastructure, including roads, rail, air, pipelines, ports, and liquid natural gas terminals;
* The maintenance of transportation infrastructure and the role of emerging technologies, such as driverless cars, in enhancing the utilization of that infrastructure;
* Transportation safety and the impact of new technologies, such as in-vehicle tests for sobriety, communication and monitoring tools that rely on the radio frequency spectrum, and new vehicle design features;
* The emergence of new transportation modalities, either as a result of technological changes that permit new uses of existing transport modes (ridesharing, for example) or as a result of technological advances that create new options (electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, for example);
* The regulation and political economy of the transportation sector at both the federal and sub-federal levels;
* The valuation of transportation amenities, including travel time, congestion, various transportation-related risks including cybersecurity breaches, and other mode-specific attributes;
* The impact of new technologies for managing surface freight transportation, including those involving large data sets combined with statistical analysis such as machine learning, on load factors and other features of the surface freight industry;
* The environmental impact of transportation activities, including the valuation of transportation-related environmental amenities;
* The impact of the transportation sector on the broader economy, including its role in affecting the labor market and the employment prospects for workers at various skill levels, the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector, the internal structure of economic activity within urban areas, the spatial distribution of economic activity between rural and urban areas, and the costs of wholesale and retail trade.
* The implications of COVID-19 and new production technologies, such as remote working, for the spatial distribution of economic activity and the transportation sector.
* The measurement and estimation of the benefits and costs of, and willingness to pay for, transport infrastructure improvements, and the development of market-based mechanisms for pricing such improvements.
During the 2019-20 academic year, this initiative supported six projects. They were summarized at a research conference in October 2020:
http://conference.nber.org/sched/ETf20
Researchers interested in studying these topics, or others that relate to transportation economics, should submit a proposal of no more than five pages, single spaced, including references, tables, graphs, and other supplementary material, in PDF format by Wednesday, November 4, 2020. Each proposal should describe the research question to be studied, the data and methods to be used, and the composition of the research team that will be carrying out the project. Preliminary findings are welcome. The proposal must include a conflict of interest statement describing any financial or other interests of the research team that might bear on the proposed work, especially any financial or other ties to the transportation industry. To be eligible for support, the principal investigator on each project, or at least one investigator in the case of multi-authored projects, must be a faculty member at a U.S. college or university. Researchers must hold a Ph.D. in order to be listed as an investigator or co-investigator. Graduate students may draw support from a project, and they may co-author the resulting research paper, but for the purposes of the proposal, they may not be an investigator.
Proposals for both theoretical and empirical projects, from scholars who are early in their careers, with and without NBER affiliations, and from researchers from under-represented groups are especially welcome. Proposals may be submitted by following this link:
http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfprop?id=ETf21
The organizers will review the proposals and make recommendations for support, subject to the approval of the Department of Transportation. Researchers who submit proposals that are selected for inclusion in the project will be notified by December 31, 2020. The research team for each project will receive $22,500 of salary support for the principal investigator(s) and $10,000 in research assistant support, $1000 for travel, and $500 for other research costs. Investigators and research assistants must be eligible to be paid as NBER employees; the NBER will not make sub-awards.
In addition to providing research funding for a selected set of projects, the initiative will also facilitate access to a number of data sets on the transportation sector that are collected and maintained by the DOT. A partial index of available data may be found on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website, bts.gov.
Research teams will be expected to participate in a video preconference in February 2021 and a capstone research conference in October 2021. If in-person meetings are possible, the NBER will cover the cost of domestic travel and hotel expenses for up to two authors per paper and for discussants to attend that conference. Additional co-authors, and other participants, are welcome to attend.
Questions related to research proposals or other aspects of this research initiative should be directed to Alison Oaxaca at aoaxaca@nber.org.
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