Descrizione del progetto
Mettere il benessere sociale al centro dell’infrastruttura dei trasporti
I trasporti rappresentano una parte importante della società, dell’economia e del benessere sociale. I paesi di tutto il mondo compiono investimenti significativi nel mantenimento e nel miglioramento della loro infrastruttura dei trasporti e del relativo sviluppo. Tali investimenti esercitano un impatto sulla società, dai livelli di inquinamento all’accesso a beni e servizi essenziali. Ciò solleva dubbi riguardo al modo in cui si dovrebbero attribuire gli investimenti infrastrutturali nello spazio per massimizzare il benessere sociale. Questa è una delle domande chiave a cui il progetto OPTNETSPACE, finanziato dall’UE, cerca di rispondere. A tal fine, il progetto svilupperà innovativi modelli teorici e quantitativi con l’obiettivo di analizzare l’impatto economico dei progetti infrastrutturali e svilupperà strumenti a uso dei ricercatori e dei responsabili delle politiche in questo campo.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- 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
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
08005 Barcelona
Spagna