Complementary Pricing and Land Use Policies: Does It Lead to Higher Transit Use?

Problem, research strategy, and findings: A shift toward more sustainable transportation requires both adequate pricing of externalities from driving and supportive land use policies. However, proponents of each approach often under-estimate the complementarity and potential synergy between them. This study investigates the interaction effects between gasoline prices and land use (policy) variables using a panel dataset of transit ridership in 67 urbanized areas between 2002 and 2010. We found that while doubling the average gasoline price would increase transit ridership by 8.4% in an urbanized area with mean density and no regional containment policy, in areas with slightly higher density and a regional containment policy, the impact of higher gasoline prices would rise to 21%. In communities that had adopted a package of smart growth land use options, the impact of higher gasoline prices on transit use is even greater.

Takeaway for practice: Pricing schemes will be more effective where alternatives to automobility and supportive land use policies exist. The impacts of urban form on travel behavior are also strengthened when driving externalities are correctly priced. Planners and policymakers should take advantage of the complementarity between pricing and land use planning approaches by implementing policies in combined and well-coordinated ways.     

Spatial price competition in retail gasoline markets: evidence from Austria

This paper investigates the influence of unbranded stations on the prices charged by branded stations in the retail gasoline sector, using data on 400 stations in Lower Austria. As the market is characterized by spatial competition, a spatial lag model is used to avoid misspecification. The results show that independent retailers generally heighten price competition, as they charge significantly lower prices. At the same time, as consumers might consider gasoline sold at unbranded stations to be inferior, they also reduce price competition for branded stations. Independents therefore ultimately have only a small influence on the prices charged by branded stations.     

Spatial spillovers in US wholesale gasoline markets

This paper analyses how oil industry‐related activities in neighbouring gasoline markets affect local markets. Our contribution consists of applying spatial econometric models to better understand pricing behaviour in US gasoline markets and the spatial phenomena unique to this particular industry. We find that neighbouring state‐level gasoline price variation explains a large portion of the variation of in‐state (or local) gasoline prices. Consistent with intuition, the empirical results imply that wholesale gasoline prices are positively affected by state and federal‐level gasoline content regulations. Further, our results suggest that changes in state‐level wholesale gasoline prices respond to both in‐state and neighbouring‐state inventory levels.     

What Determines the Price Elasticity of House Supply? Real Interest Rate Effects and Cyclical Asymmetries

This paper offers a theoretical discussion of the price elasticity of supply. While there have been a number of attempts to estimate the responsiveness of UK supply, relatively little has been written on what determines it. A key omission is the effect of long-term real interest rates. Steep falls in both the annual rent to house price ratio and long real interest rates during a period of relatively static real rents in the UK suggest that the stream of future imputed rents became discounted at successively lower interest rates between 1996 and 2007. New supply responded sluggishly to price rises during this period, but then collapsed rapidly as the market turned in 2008. This paper argues that the decline in long-term real interest rates contributed to rising house prices and the inelastic supply response during the long upswing, and that cyclical asymmetries inherent in the supply response have been exacerbated by changes in the financial system and increased government regulation of the planning process.     

Understanding the impact of built environment on metro ridership using open source in Shanghai

A growing body of research using the direct demand model has explored the impact of the built environment on transit ridership. However, empirical studies identified various significant factors in different cities with different datasets. This study adopts points-of-interest (POIs) data to identify the physical environmental factors affecting metro ridership in Shanghai. Independent variables in terms of the rail transit system, external connectivity, intermodal connection, and land use factors within 286 metro stations' catchment areas were selected. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to group POIs into 6 components for dimensionality reduction. The results from ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis emphasize the dominating role of commercial land use and rail transit system factors, together with bus stops, tourist spots and healthcare factors, positively impact both weekday and weekend metro ridership; however, the effect of job-related land use is significant only on weekdays. Distinctively, the variable of intersection density is not positively associated with ridership as expected, revealing that street network measurements may not explain walking to rail transit in the citywide Shanghai context, so we suggest a new requirement: a multilevel-based walkability index in dense cities. The latter finding also implied that residences in central locations are less reliable than those in suburban locations. Finally, we conclude with strategies to encourage balanced trip demands other than simply increasing ridership, which has potential implications on urban planning and transit-oriented development (TOD) in China.     

Does bus accessibility affect property prices?

Existing studies have yet reached consistent conclusions on accessibility benefits of buses. Most existing studies have been conducted in the context of the West, where bus patronage is generally low. In this study, we used a database of 22,586 secondhand residential properties in 358 residential estates in Xiamen, China to develop four non-spatial hedonic pricing models (one standard and three Box-Cox transformed) and two spatial econometric models to quantify the effects of bus accessibility on property prices and analyze how the introduction of spatial econometric models would influence estimates of such benefits. Our findings are as follows. (1) Access to bus stops is positively correlated with property prices. This outcome is in contrast with findings of mainstream research (or conventional wisdom). For every bus stop within 500 m, the price of a property is 0.5% higher, all else being equal. (2) Bus travel times to essential destinations significantly influence housing prices. (3) Spatial econometric models that account for spatial autocorrelation outperform traditional hedonic pricing models. A few robustness check analyses further guarantee the plausibility of this study. However, the price premiums offered by bus accessibility may be gradually decreased, even eventually discarded, because of declining attractiveness for bus travel and continuous transit service enhancement in the forthcoming years.     

Price relationships between crude oil and transport fuels in the European Union before and after the 2008 financial crisis

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the crude oil price and consumer prices of transport fuels in the European Union before and after the 2008 financial crisis. We perform a two-period analysis by providing pre-break and post-break estimates. We found a strong and reciprocal linkage between crude oil and gasoline prices in the pre-break period, but there does not seem to exist a similar relationship in the post-break period. The findings are robust to variations in the specification of the empirical models with and without applicable taxes.     

Customer response to day-ahead market hourly pricing: Choices and performance

Real-time pricing (RTP) has been advocated to address extreme price volatility and market power in electricity markets. This study of Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation's largest customers analyzes their choices and performance in response to day-ahead, default-service RTP. Overall price response is modest: 119 customers are estimated to reduce their peak demand by about 10% at high prices. Manufacturing customers are most responsive with a price elasticity of 0.16, followed by government/education customers (0.11), while commercial/retail, healthcare and public works customers are, at present, relatively unresponsive. Within market segments, individual customer response varies significantly.     

Price effects of spatial competition in retail fuel markets: the impact of a new rival nearby

Our main goal in this paper is to understand the fuel market's spatial price competition. While most of the literature uses the density of gas stations and proximity to rivals as proxies for spatial competition, we measured the marginal increase in spatial competition by the entrance of a new rival nearby. The empirical results indicate that a new firm's entrance reduces prices, and the reduction is more significant the closer the new rival is. A new rival less than 100 meters away is related to a reduction of 2.6% on the typical incumbent firm price. When the new rival is located farther than 250 meters, the incumbent response is lower than 1%. For even greater distances, the effects were significant only when incumbents are unbranded. The extent of spatial competition matters for the outcome; while firms that already faced intense spatial competition are not impacted by having an entrant seller nearby, those facing low spatial competition had a significant price reduction. The pattern, entry of rivals closer matters more, remains when investigating the gasoline price, the ethanol price, and the gasoline wholesale-retail margins in Brazil.     

Exploring,modelling and predicting spatiotemporal variations in house prices

Hedonic price modelling has long been a powerful tool to estimate house prices in the real estate market. Increasingly, traditional global hedonic price models that largely ignore spatial effects are being superseded by models that deal with spatial dependency and spatial heterogeneity. In addition, many novel methods integrating spatial economics, statistics and geographical information science (GIScience) have been developed recently to incorporate temporal effects into hedonic house price modelling. Here, a local spatial modelling technique, geographically weighted regression (GWR), which accounts for spatial heterogeneity in housing utility functions is applied to a 19-year set of house price data in London (1980–1998) in order to explore spatiotemporal variations in the determinants of house prices. Further, based on the local parameter estimates derived from GWR, a new method integrating GWR and time series (TS) forecasting techniques, GWR–TS, is proposed to predict future local parameters and thus future house prices. The results obtained from GWR demonstrate variations in local parameter estimates over both space and time. The forecasted future values of local estimates as well as house prices indicate that the proposed GWR–TS method is a useful addition to hedonic price modelling.

     

A study of hydrogen as an alternative fuel

ABSTRACT

As oil prices increase, the interest in alternative fuels increases. This is evidenced by demonstration programmes and commitments by states such as India. The concern of the air quality in many areas around the world makes ?nding solutions more urgent. As the price of oil increases, alternate fuels become more ruthless. Major questions remain to be answered on which fuel or fuels will emerge and to what extent alternative sources will replace gasoline as the main product of crude oil. A combination of available alternative fuels will evolve with the most likely choices affected by a number of technical, political and market factors. In order to allow a wider application of alternative fuels, a number of obstacles have to be overcome. These include economic, technological, and infrastructural issues. In the past, gasoline has been plentiful and has had a signi?cant price advantage compared to other fuels. This could change quickly and alternative fuels would need to become more commonplace. One of the alternatives involves the more widespread use of biomass-produced fuels. In this paper describes that hydrogen as an alternative fuel. Hydrogen powered fuel cells could have wide applications, replacing batteries in many portable application, vehicle and using hydrogen for home electrical needs.     

RENAISSANCE OF LARGE-SCALE MODELS

ABSTRACT This paper develops a simple spatial Marxian system of production price in which transportation is produced like any other commodity. Marx's principles of the labour theory of value arc formulated as macroeconomic constraints on steady-state prices. Competition brings about the establishment of a uniform price intrasectorally and the equalisation of profit rates intersect orally. Contrary to conventional premises, competition also brings forth a stochastic equilibrium in which individual commodities are produced by a multiplicity of local techniques of unequal profitability. It is in this context that Marx's concepts of individual and average prices of production are given a spatial interpretation.     

天然气价格的探讨

分析比较了国外天然气的价格和上海市4种天然气气源的价格。探讨了影响天然气价格制定的因素，对建立上海市天然气的价格制度进行了探讨。     

Expectation Adjustment in the Housing Market: Insights from the Scottish Auction System

This paper examines price expectation adjustment of house buyers and sellers to rapid changes in the housing market using data from Scotland where houses are sold through ‘first-price sealed-bid’ auctions. These auctions provide more information on market signals, incentives and the behaviour of market participants than private treaty sales. This paper therefore provides a theoretical framework for analysing revealed preference data generated from these auctions. We specifically focus on the analysis of the selling to asking price difference, the ‘bid-premium’. The bid-premium is shown to be affected by expectations of future price movements, market duration and high bidding frequency. The bid-premium reflects consumer's expectations, adapting to market conditions more promptly than asking price setting behaviour and final sale prices. The volatile conditions of the recent housing market bubble are fully reflected in the bid-premium, whereas the asking and sale prices are much less prone to rapid movements.     

Regional productivity and relative prices dynamics: the case of Italy

In this paper, we study the cointegrating space spanned by Italian regional relative prices and per capita GDPs. To this end, we combine panel data with vector error correction model estimation in an innovative approach which is still under development. The results are interesting: regional prices, which seem to persistently deviate from the law of one price (PPP), cointegrate with relative per capita GDPs. The estimated elasticity is not consistent with the Balassa–Samuelson hypothesis but is closer to supporting the classical supply-demand schedule. Weak-causality testing gives further details on linkages between the real and nominal side of Italy’s regionally diversified economy. Homogeneity of the coefficients, lacking at a national level, can be recovered at a more disaggregated macro-area level.     

基于均衡价格形成机制的住宅价格变化特征研究

依据供求关系原理和住宅价格变化特征模型,探讨住宅均衡价格的形成机制与住宅实际价格的变化机理。利用我国35个大中城市2000～2004年的经济统计指标和住宅市场数据,识别出住宅均衡价格;并将实际价格变化分解成均衡价格变化、实际价格的均值回复和趋势性运动等三个组成部分,重点研究住宅实际价格与均衡价格之间的关系。研究表明:我国住宅市场存在由供求基础决定的均衡价格,城镇家庭人均可支配收入、个人住房抵押贷款利率水平、城镇人均居住面积、非农人口数等需求因素,以及供给成本、城市化水平和城市建成区面积等供给因素对住宅均衡价格存在显著影响;住宅实际价格的变化受到均衡价格变化的显著影响;住宅实际价格可通过自我调整回复到均衡价格水平,并存在缓慢上涨的趋势。     

An integrated model for electricity market coupling simulations: Evidence from the European power market crossroad

Motivated by the project of European Power Exchanges to develop a single price-coupling solution to calculate electricity prices across Europe that respects the cross-border capacity constraints on a day-ahead basis, we empirically examine and quantify market inefficiencies in non-coupled day-ahead electricity markets. These result from inefficient cross-border capacity allocation and its underlying effect on the market clearing prices. Efficient cross-border capacity allocation and new market clearing prices are simulated using a social welfare maximisation algorithm for the capacity of relevant network elements, whereas the order book generation process is reproduced by the econometrically estimated supply price elasticity functions. The estimated vector autoregression model and the underlying impulse response functions examine price shock transmission under different market regimes. The market coupling process is simulated on the historical non-coupled day-ahead market realisations at the junction of three regional power markets: Central Western Europe, Northern Italian, and South Eastern European markets. Simulation results confirm steady, efficient cross-border capacity utilisation, reduced price variance, improved overall price convergence and amplified price shock transmission in coupled electricity markets. Furthermore, in the simulated period, we have estimated an increase in the overall suppliers' and consumers’ surplus of almost EUR 16 million. The proposed simulation framework is a clear choice for applied simulation in coupled day-ahead electricity markets, offering valuable visual insights into the cross-border capacity allocation and its implications on electricity prices.     

A Hotelling style model of spatial competition for a convenience good

Ordinarily people do not make special purpose trips to acquire goods like gasoline or groceries but instead buy them as the need arises in the course of their daily lives. Such goods are commonly called convenience goods. We modify Hotelling??s model of spatial competition so that we can analyze the price equilibrium of duopolists that retail a convenience good. Certain features of the duopolists?? demand functions suggest that price competition is more severe in the convenience goods model than in the Hotelling model. The same features complicate the analysis because they mean that a pure strategy price equilibrium does not exist for many locational configurations. Although we are not able to find the mixed strategy price equilibrium analytically, we do present some numerical results on equilibrium prices that broadly confirm this suggestion. We also provide a more general product differentiation interpretation of the convenience good model.     

The long- and short-run influences of housing prices on migration

A change in housing prices has a profound impact on households' housing equity and future moving decisions. While most previous studies focus on discussing the mobility lock-in effect due to housing price depreciation, revealing that there is a positive relationship between housing prices and migration, this study reexamines their relationship by using the panel cointegration method and city-level panel data for Taiwan during the 1994–2016 period. The empirical results reveal that migration and housing prices are cointegrated, and the influence of housing prices on migration is significantly positive in the long run. However, the influence of housing price changes on migration is not as significant as expected in the short run. To further examine their short-run relationships, we use quantile regression and the results show that the influence of housing price changes on migration is significantly negative below the 0.5 quantile, but it turns out to be significantly positive in the 0.9 quantile. The influence of housing price changes on migration is not significant between the 0.5 and 0.8 quantiles. We conclude that the influence of housing price changes on migration might be asymmetric in the short run.     

EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN TRANSPORTATION AND PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY AND CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR ON THE SIZE AND MARKET AREA OF URBAN ESTABLISHMENTS

ABSTRACT This paper develops a model to examine how the size of urban public establishments is affected by changes in transportation and production technology and customer behaviour. The size and market area are determined by minimizing the sum of average travel cost and average production cost, subject to demand-supply and revenue-cost equalities. The results show that improved transportation technology and reduced transportation cost have the effect of enlarging the size and market area, and the extent of this depends on the customers sensitivity to travel time. The effects of raised factor prices in production depend on the elasticity of the customer's demand with respect to the produced price.