【2024 年1月10日（周三）经济系学术讲座】 

题   目：Public Transit Provision and Fare Structure in U.S. Cities

嘉   宾：王炳霖 PhD Candidate 康奈尔大学

主持人：钱军辉 教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时   间：2024 年1月10日（周三）14:00-15:30

地   点：上海交通大学徐汇校区安泰经济与管理学院B207

内容简介：

Public transit in the U.S. is characterized by low quality and ridership compared to its global counterparts. This paper aims to understand the provision of public transit in U.S. cities and whether the current fare structure can be redesigned to improve efficiency and equity. I develop a structural model of transit service demand and supply, with the demand side capturing commuters’ travel mode choices and the supply side characterizing the decisions of transit managers regarding fare and service quality. Using a novel data set created from a fine level national household travel survey combined with data from Google Maps along with transit operation data, I estimate the model to recover urban commuter preferences on travel times, cost structure for supplying transit services, while taking into account transit manager’s political or distributional preferences. The estimated parameters suggest that transit agencies, under financial constraints, prioritize lower-income and nonWhite populations in their decisions. Counterfactual simulations show that means-tested pricing could more effectively address equity concerns without compromising efficiency gains. Furthermore, even in the absence of explicit means-testing, pricing models such as cross-modal subsidization and zonebased transit fares can achieve comparable distributional objectives, though these schemes differ in their specific distributional and welfare properties.

演讲人简介：

Binglin Wang is a PhD candidate at the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. His research agenda spans urban and transportation economics, environmental and energy economics, and empirical industrial organization. A major focus of his current work is on promoting sustainable transportation and energy use. He has conducted extensive studies on public transit, electric vehicles, and the implications of energy use and regulations. From 2021 to 2022, Binglin served as a shortterm consultant at the World Bank with the Office of the Chief Economist for Infrastructure. Additionally, he is a referee for journals such as JAERE, JEEM, and CER. Prior to pursuing his PhD, Binglin was a pre-doctoral research assistant at Cornell Institute for China Economic Research and received his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.