Prof. Anas wins the Richard J. Arnott Overall Best Paper Prize

Alex Anas, Frank H. and Josephine L. Goodyear Professor, Department of Economics, won the Richard J. Arnott Overall Best Paper Prize for the paper entitled “Downs’s Law Under the Lens of Theory: Roads Lower Congestion and Increase Distance Traveled,” awarded by the  Scientific Committee of the International Transportation Economics Association’s Annual  School and Conference 2023, held in Santander, Spain, from June 12 -16. Of the 184 papers submitted, 154  were accepted and 122  were presented. The paper was also presented remotely at the 2022 SMU-Jinan Conference on Urban and Regional Economics, Singapore Management University, 8,9 December 2022; and at the European Meetings of the Urban Economics Association, Bocconi University, Milan, May 5,6 2023. The paper corrects a major misconception and misspecification of how traffic congestion affects aggregate distance traveled,  arising from an empirical study by Gilles Duranton (University of Pennsylvania) and Matthew Turner (Brown) published in 2011 in the American Economic Review and gathering over 1000 citations. In their paper they concluded that building more roads raises traffic congestion. More broadly, Dr. Anas’s paper demonstrates the  consequences of a trend in economic research that emerged in the past twenty years: that econometric application not grounded in theory often leads to wrong conclusions. Dr. Anas believes that his paper shows “there is nothing more applicable than good theory.”

The paper can be accessed in SSRN: “Downs's Law” Under the Lens of Theory: Roads Lower Congestion and Increase Distance Traveled by Alex Anas :: SSRN