Essays in Transport Economics
Loading...
Date
2021-09-13
Authors
Garcia, Brett
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Transportation plays an important role in economic growth and development, as it interacts with almost all other industries. Whether it be through barge, rail, road, or air, shippers are charged a price to have a commodity transported between an origin and destination, and transportation firms incur costs in facilitating the movement. However, there is a geographic nature inherent in transport networks that tends to result in varying degrees of market concentration, which impacts the prices and costs of the shipment. As a result, there exists a lengthy and ongoing debate regarding whether and how policymakers should intervene in these markets.
While transport is indeed essential to many sectors, the relative use of competing modes of transport has evolved over time due to changes in technology, public opinion, and public policy. As market participants adapt to these changes, they rely on accurate measures of market conditions to help guide their operational decisions. Accurate forecasts are needed to analyze past, current, and future operational needs. Reliable measures of shipment costs are needed by both regulators and market participants to help set shipment prices and evaluate the reasonability of these prices. Models that relate prices, costs, and markups to the presence of transport competition are needed to understand how market participants respond to changes in market conditions.
In this dissertation, I discuss my research investigating the industrial organization of transport markets in the United States. The dominant theme of my dissertation is transport economics. In chapter two, I predict waterborne commerce levels using a Bayesian model averaging (BMA) approach. In chapter three, I develop and estimate a multiproduct cost function for railroads. In chapter four, I operationalize the multiproduct cost function to estimate rail markups and quantify how these markups relate to the presence of transport competition.
Description
Keywords
Applied econometrics, Industrial organization, Transportation