Description du projet
Placer le bien-être social au cœur des infrastructures de transport
Le transport constitue un élément important de la société, de l’économie et du bien-être social. Les pays du monde entier investissent considérablement dans l’entretien, l’amélioration et le développement de leurs infrastructures de transport. Ces investissements ont un impact sur la société, des niveaux de pollution à l’accès aux biens et services essentiels, ce qui soulève la question de comment allouer ces investissements dans les infrastructures selon l’espace afin d’optimiser le bien-être social. Voici l’une des questions fondamentales à laquelle le projet OPTNETSPACE, financé par l’UE, tente de répondre. Pour ce faire, il élaborera des modèles théoriques et quantitatifs innovants pour analyser l’incidence économique des projets d’infrastructure et développera des outils que les chercheurs et les décideurs politiques du domaine pourront utiliser.
Objectif
Every year, the world economy invests a large amount of resources to improve or develop transport infrastructure. How should these investments be allocated to maximize social welfare? In this proposal, I propose to develop and apply new methods to study optimal transport networks in general-equilibrium models of international trade, urban economics and economic geography. The methodology will build on recent work (Fajgelbaum and Schaal, 2017), in which my coauthor and I studied the network design problem in a general neoclassical trade framework.
In the first project, I develop a new framework to analyze optimal infrastructure investment in an urban setting. The model features people commuting between residential areas and business districts as well as a choice over the mode of transportation. We plan to evaluate the framework to historical data about specific cities.
In the second project, I propose and implement an new algorithm to compute optimal transport networks in the presence of increasing returns to transport, a likely prominent feature of real-world networks. The algorithm applies a branch-and-bound method in a series of geometric programming relaxations of the problem.
In the third project, I study the dynamic evolution of actual transport networks using satellite data from the US, India and Mexico. In the spirit of Hsieh and Klenow (2007), I use the model to measure distortions in the placement of roads between rich and poor countries.
In the fourth project, I study the inefficiencies and welfare losses associated with political economy frictions among governments and planning agencies. I use the model to identify inefficiencies and relate them to measures of institutions and political outcomes.
In the final project, I propose a new explanation behind the Zipf’s law distribution of city sizes. I show that Zipf’s law may result from particular topological properties of optimal transport networks that allocate resources efficiently in space.
Champ scientifique
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringsatellite technology
- social sciencessocial geographycultural and economic geography
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicspolitical economy
- social scienceslaw
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementcommerce
Programme(s)
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitution d’accueil
08005 Barcelona
Espagne