Innovating Works

OPTNETSPACE

Financiado
Optimal Transport Networks in Spatial Equilibrium
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 ap... 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. ver más
30/06/2024
888K€
Duración del proyecto: 68 meses Fecha Inicio: 2018-10-11
Fecha Fin: 2024-06-30

Línea de financiación: concedida

El organismo H2020 notifico la concesión del proyecto el día 2024-06-30
Línea de financiación objetivo El proyecto se financió a través de la siguiente ayuda:
ERC-2018-STG: ERC Starting Grant
Cerrada hace 7 años
Presupuesto El presupuesto total del proyecto asciende a 888K€
Líder del proyecto
CENTRE DE RECERCA EN ECONOMIA INTERNACIONAL Otra investigación y desarrollo experimental en ciencias naturales y técnicas organismos publicos
Perfil tecnológico TRL 4-5 50K