Anca D. Cristea

Air service and urban growth: Evidence from a quasi-natural policy experiment

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the role of air services. This paper exploits the large and swift changes to air traffic induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to identify the link between air traffic and local economic growth. Using data for 263 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) over a two-decade time period, we estimate the effects of airline traffic on local population, income, and employment growth. Our most conservative estimates suggest that a 50-percent increase in an average city’s air traffic growth rate generates an additional stream of income over a 20-year period equal to 7.4 percent of real GDP, the equivalent of

The effect of communication costs on trade in headquarter services

523.3 million in 1978 dollars.

Open Skies Over the Middle East

Communication is a real barrier to organizing international production as it hinders knowledge transmission. This paper provides evidence to suggest that a way in which multinational firms economize on costly information transfers is by using skilled foreign workers, since local talent can substitute for knowledge inputs from the headquarters. Combining U.S. data on headquarter service exports with information on communication costs and skill endowments by country, I find that while communication costs decrease the export of headquarter services to foreign affiliates, the effect becomes weaker in the average educational attainment of foreign workers. The sensitivity of headquarter service exports to communication barriers at low levels of skill endowment has important implications for the geography of multinational production, as well as for policies aimed at improving communication infrastructure.

Trade and the greenhouse gas emissions from international freight transport

The dynamism of air traffic markets in the Middle East obscures the persistence of restrictions on international competition. But how important are such restrictions for passenger traffic? This paper uses detailed data on worldwide passenger aviation to estimate the effect of air transport policy on international air traffic. The policy variable is a quantitative measure of the commitments under international agreements. The paper analyzes, for the first time, not only bilateral agreements, but also plurilateral agreements such as the one between Arab states. The analysis finds that more liberal policy is associated with greater passenger traffic between countries. Higher traffic levels appear to be driven primarily by larger numbers of city pairs being served, rather than by more passengers traveling along given routes. To demonstrate the quantitative implication of the estimates, two liberalization scenarios in the Middle East are evaluated. Deepening the plurilateral agreement among Arab states would lead to a 30 percent increase in intraregional passenger traffic. Widening the agreement to include Turkey would generate significantly larger gains because current policy vis-a-vis Turkey is much more restrictive. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)