Publications

2017

• The economics of crowding in rail transit
  
  • de Palma André
  • Lindsey Robin
  • Monchambert Guillaume
  Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, 2017, 101, pp.106 - 122. We model trip-timing decisions of rail transit users who trade off crowding costs and disutility from traveling early or late. With no fare or a uniform fare, ridership is too concentrated on timely trains. Marginal-cost-pricing calls for time-dependent fares that smooth train loads and generate more revenue than an optimal uniform fare. The welfare gains from time-dependent fares are unlikely to increase as ridership grows. However, imposing time-dependent fares raises the benefits of expanding capacity by either adding trains or increasing train capacity. We illustrate these results by calibrating the model to the Paris RER A transit system. (10.1016/j.jue.2017.06.003)
  DOI : 10.1016/j.jue.2017.06.003
• Transactions in the European carbon market: a bubble of compliance in a whirlpool of speculation
  
  • Berta Nathalie
  • Gautherat Emmanuelle
  • Gun Ozgur
  Cambridge Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press (OUP), 2017, 41 (2), pp.287-318. The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is supposed to help regulated installations to cover their CO2 emissions by trading in allowances. In practice, the EU ETS is mainly a financial market used for hedging and speculation. This financial feature is regarded as a solution (hedging and liquidity) to a problem (the price risk and volatility imposed on installations) which the market has actually created itself. This paper provides an estimation of the real underpinning of the scheme, i.e. the needs of installations for allowances transfers to achieve compliance in the two first exchange periods. This estimation, which was singularly lacking in the literature, shows that compliance transactions become more and more marginal as market activity grows, and they are drowned in a whirlpool of speculation. This challenges the role of the carbon price, whether it reveals a financial and self-referential evaluation rather than the installations’ marginal abatement costs, the condition of cost-effectiveness expected from carbon trading. (10.1093/cje/bew041)
  DOI : 10.1093/cje/bew041