Professor Opinder Kaur is an applied microeconomist with research interests in labor economics, development economics, health economics, and the economics of education. She received her PhD from the University of California Riverside
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.
For as much as U.S. metros have grown over the past few decades, commute times have remained oddly stable. One-way commutes averaged 21.7 minutes in 1980 and 25.3 minutes in 2010.
