Tainá Pacheco (p)

Chiara Morlotti

This paper studies the effect of commuting subsidies on the commuting distance and commute mode choice of employees. In Brazil, since 1985 formal workers are entitled to a public transport commuting voucher: employers pay for the full cost of public transportation in a voucher and discount 6% of employees gross wage. In this context, the voucher works as an implicit subsidy. Thereby, I exploit the existence of two kinds of workers to investigate if the lack of access to the voucher can make workers travel shorter distances and use more active and private modes of transportation.
I use data from São Paulo. The city runs a travel survey every 10 years since 1967. I use the 2017 edition that surveyed 22 thousand households, or 57 thousand individuals. I restricted the data for workers with a non-fixed contract with a private company, regardless of their type of contract (formal, informal, or self-employed). My final data has 12,573 individuals: 11,252 are and 1,321 are not entitled to the voucher (informal, or self-employed workers). Since workers entitled and not entitled to the benefit were not compared in observable characteristics, I rely on a matching strategy for estimating causal effects. The variables used were: type of occupation (white-collar, arts and science, medium level technicians, administrative service worker, worker from the service sector, agricultural sector, or industrial sector, salesperson, repair and maintenance worker, arm, police or fireman, other), level of education (elementary school, high school, college), individual position in the household (head of, spouse, children), age, household income and size, accessibility by transit from place of residence, housing status (owner, renter), and dummies for working in downtown area, female, student, and living in the downtown region.
Using the matched sample, I estimated the policy effect using an OLS model for commuting distance and a multinomial logit model for the mode choice. I find that not being entitled to the benefit makes commuting distances 880 meters shorter. If compared to median commute distance in the sample (5.7 km for those entitled and 3.6 km for those not entitled), not being able to access the voucher is explaining 42% of the difference in distance among the two groups.
Additionally, I show that individuals not entitled to the voucher are, compared to the odds of traveling by car, less likely to take transit and walking if compared to the group that can access the benefit.

Albert Gragera (p), Sofia F. Franco

Tainá Pacheco

This paper discusses the parking problems faced by major cities around the world, particularly regarding on-street parking and the misallocation of demand that leads to cruising for parking. Parking is a critical urban transportation policy that can significantly impact urban land use.
Theoretical studies emphasize the need to maintain an appropriate price differential between curbside and garage fees to eliminate cruising for parking by allocating excessive curbside demand to available garage supply, yet the spatial competition of parking operators, their pricing strategies and its interplay with on-street parking regulation has received little empirical scrutiny.
This paper contributes to filling this knowledge gap by investigating the determinants of private garage prices. Contrary to previous research, we aim to estimate the causal effects of competition and curbside fees on garage prices, using both instrumental variables and a geographic regression discontinuity approach taking advantage of a quasi-experiment parking regulation introduced in Lisbon.
Our results suggest that private garages do compete with curbside parking, with the relative scarcity of on-street spaces allowing them to increase markups. Garage fees are positively linked with curbside prices suggesting that these are strategic complements. Our causal estimates suggest so far garages are able to fully pass curbside fee increases to customers (in high-demand areas), creating a threat to alleviate fee differentials without price regulations.

Giuseppe Bruno, Antonio Diglio, Mattia Cattaneo, Chiara Morlotti (p), Stefano Paleari, Carmela Piccolo

Albert Gragera

Ensuring a high level of accessibility to healthcare services is a key policy goal. In these terms, the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) dedicates great attention to territorial medicine, including investments devoted to the re-organization of primary care services. In this study, we assess the variations in accessibility to primary care services under different scenarios, where both demand and supply changes are investigated. Scenarios are simulated combining the current and future distribution of primary care services, and population spatial evolution over time. On the supply side, we ground on an extensive dataset of General Practitioners’ (GPs) services belonging to a Nordic Italian region. On the demand side, we elaborate census-level detailed information and future regional projections. Accessibility is measured by relying on a tailored two-step floating catchment method which accounts for the actual temporal availability of GPs, allowing to accurately measure the demand/supply mismatch across both space and time. It is estimated a drop in future levels of accessibility equal to -7%, -13%, and -19% in 5, 10, and 15 years, respectively. After assessing the levers of such drops, namely population ageing, decrease in population, and the expected reduction of service capacity, we propose two different scenarios which ground on the introduction of community healthcare centers on the territory. The two proposed scenarios show how a redistribution of the capacity towards community healthcare centers may improve future levels of accessibility. Ultimately, several insights for policymakers are drawn, assessing the potential effects determined by the implementation of new developed models of territorial medicine.