| 1. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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Does uncertainty make cost-benefit analyses pointless?
- 2016
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Ingår i: Transportation Research Part A. - Stockholm : Elsevier BV. - 0965-8564 .- 1879-2375. ; 92, s. 195-205
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is widely used in public decision making on infrastructure investments. However, the demand forecasts, cost estimates, benefit valuations and effect assessments that are conducted as part of CBAs are all subject to various degrees of uncertainty. The question is to what extent CBAs, given such uncertainties, are still useful as a way to prioritize between infrastructure investments, or put differently, how robust the policy conclusions of CBA are with respect to uncertainties. Using simulations based on real data on national infrastructure plans in Sweden and Norway, we study how investment selection and total realized benefits change when decisions are based on CBA assessments subject to several different types of uncertainty.Our results indicate that realized benefits and investment selection are surprisingly insensitive to all studied types of uncertainty, even for high levels of uncertainty. The two types of uncertainty that affect results the most are uncertainties about investment cost and transport demand. Provided that decisions are based on CBA outcomes, reducing uncertainty is still worthwhile, however, because of the huge sums at stake. Even moderate reductions of uncertainties about unit values, investment costs, future demand and project effects may increase the realized benefits infrastructure investment plans by tens or hundreds of million euros. We conclude that, despite the many types of uncertainties, CBA is able to fairly consistently separate the wheat from the chaff and hence contribute to substantially improved infrastructure decisions.
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| 2. |
- Thureson, Disa, 1985-
(författare)
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Cost-Benefit Analysis of climate policy and long term public investments
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This compilation dissertation consists of four essays with the common theme of welfare analysis of long-term public investments. The first two essays focus on analysis of climate change mitigation, i.e., the social cost of carbon dioxide. The third essay focuses on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of transport investment projects, while the last essay takes a broader perspective on welfare analysis.Essay 1: The Temporal Aspects of the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases. The purpose of Essay 1 is to investigate the temporal aspects of the social cost of greenhouse gases. I find that the calculation period should ultimately be modeled to be consistent with the discount rate and that the “global-warming potential” concept is unsuitable for calculation of the social cost of GHGs other than carbon dioxide.Essay 2: Avoiding path dependence of distributional weights: Lessons from climate change economic assessments. In Essay 2, I explore shortcomings in income weighting in evaluation of climate change policy. In short, in previous versions of two of the most important existing models, regional economic growth is double counted. The proposed alternative approaches yield about 20–40% higher values of SCCO2 than the old approach.Essay 3: Does uncertainty make cost-benefit analyses pointless? In Essay 3, the aim is to investigate to what extent CBA improves the selection decision of projects when uncertainties are taken into account, using a simulation-based approach on real data of infrastructure investments. The results indicate that, in line with previous literature, CBA is a rather robust tool and considerably increases the quality of decision making compared with a random selection mechanism, even when high levels of uncertainty are considered.Essay 4: Household Production and the Elasticity of Marginal Utility of Consumption. In Essay 4, I develop a new model to show that omission of household production in a previous model leads to bias when the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, EMUC, is estimated. I further offer new, unbiased estimates based on current evidence of the included parameters, suggesting a lower bound of EMUC at about 0.9.
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| 3. |
- Thureson, Disa, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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Household production and the ealsticity of marginal utility of consumption
- 2016
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Chetty (2006) developed a new method of estimating the Elasticity of Marginal Utility of Consumption (EMUC) from observed work time responses to wage changes and derived an upper bound of 2 for this parameter. Here I show that the omission of household production in Chetty’s model may lead to bias, and perform a numerical sensitivity analysis of Chetty’s results in this respect. I develop a new model that includes household production from which I derive new, unbiased EMUC formulas. I offer empirical estimates based on current evidence of the included parameters, suggesting a lower bound for EMUC of about 0.9.
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| 4. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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A new model for analyzing differentiated fares and frequencies for urban bus services in small cities : Case study for the city of Uppsala
- 2017
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this paper is to develop a model for welfare evaluation of fare and frequency policies for bus services in smaller or medium-sized cities handling both congestion and crowding in public transport. The model with data for the city of Uppsala. Two scenarios with marginal increases in frequencies and fares are evaluated. Then four main optimal policies are evaluated: fares with unchanged base line frequencies, frequencies with unchanged base line fares, simultaneous optimization of fares and frequencies and finally a scenario called the Pareto scenario where frequencies and fares are optimized subject to the condition that no consumer group (defined by zone, time period, origin-destination pair) should be worse of in terms of generalized cost of trip.The results indicate that there are large, seemingly robust welfare gains from reducing public transport supply in Uppsala, especially in the outer zone of the city where reductions compared to the current situation are rather drastic. In comparison, welfare gains from adjusting fares are smaller. As there are large distributional effects in the welfare optimum, introduction of such a policy it is likely to be controversial. However, in an additionally examined scenario, almost all of the potential social welfare gains from the welfare optimal scenario is achieved while no consumer in any zone or time period is worse off compared to present policy. In this scenario, the total number of public transport passengers are increased and emissions are reduced compared to the current situation.
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| 5. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-
(författare)
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Avoiding path dependence of distributional weights : Lessons from climate change economic assessment
- 2012
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In some cost benefit analysis (CBA) applications, such as those used for the valuation of climate change damage, distributional weights are used to account for diminishing utility of marginal income. This is usually done by means of intra-temporal distributional weights, which are combined with discounting to account for inter-temporal equity and efficiency. Here, I show that this approach might introduce some inconsistencies in terms of path dependence. In short, this inconsistency means that regional economic growth is double counted. This is because income weighting is performed both through the discount rate and through the distributional weights such that growth shows up twice in the weighting process. Using the PAGE2002 model, it is found that the inconsistency problem in the original model erases the influence of distributional weights on the social cost of carbon dioxide (SCCO2) compared to a standard CBA approach. The alternative approaches proposed here yield about 20 %–40 % higher values of SCCO2 than the old approach. While this has been briefly commented on in previous work, it has not yet been more thoroughly analyzed nor communicated to the broader community of climate policy and economic analysts who are not deeply interested in the specifications of the climate impact assessment models.
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| 6. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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Can increases in public transport supply be justified by concern for low-income individuals?
- 2018
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper evaluates the impacts of different sets of distributional weights on optimal bus fares and frequencies in the small Swedish city of Uppsala. The model used represents choice between: three transport modes—public transport, cars, and a combination of walking and cycling; two time periods— peak and off-peak hours; two zones; and three origin–destination combinations. Five scenarios are evaluated: the base year (2014), a welfare-optimal combination without distributional concerns, and welfare-optimal policies for three sets of distributional weights with increasingly larger weights on lowincome individuals. The main results are that, compared with the welfareoptimal scenario without distributional weights, increasing the weights of the low-income group successively increases service frequencies and reduces fares. However, comparing the simulated results with the actual fares and frequencies in Uppsala in 2014, optimal frequencies with even the most far-reaching distributional objectives are lower
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| 7. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-
(författare)
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Combining discounting and distributional weights. Lessons from climate change economic assessments
- 2019
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Ingår i: Economics and Policy of Energy and the Environment. - : Franco Angeli Edizioni. - 2280-7659. ; 2019:1, s. 181-201
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In some cost benefit analysis (CBA) applications, such as those used for the valuation of climate change damage, distributional weights are used to account for diminishing utility of marginal consumption. This is usually done by means of intra-temporal distributional weights, which are combined with discounting to account for inter-temporal equity and efficiency. Sometimes region-specific discount rates have used to account for differences in projected growth across geographical areas. Here I show that if intra-temporal distributional weights are used in combination with endogenous and region-specific discount rates, then this will lead to a double counting of per capita economic growth. This problem has been known for some years now – in the tight circle of top climate economist – but the peer-reviewed literature has been rather implicit about the matter. The contribution of this paper is therefore to make the problem explicit by handle it formally, and to expand its generality somewhat. It is demonstrated – using the PAGE2002 model – that correct the way of combining distributional weights and discounting yield about 20-30% higher estimates than the incorrect method.
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| 8. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-
(författare)
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Discounting transport infrastructure investments
- 2018
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The main aim of the study is to advice the Swedish national guidelines on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of transport infrastructure investments, ASEK about the appropriate set of discount-rates (currently 3.5% for all investments). To this end, first a literature review with a theoretical focus along with some new perspectives are provided. Second the conclusions are applied to Swedish infrastructure transport CBA, using the current proposition of a new HSR line as a case. Based on empirical research concerning parameter values new discount rates are estimated, and sensitivity analysis performed. The best estimate of the social discount rate in the present study, for land transport infrastructure investment in Sweden, is about 5.1%.
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| 9. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-
(författare)
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Household Production and the Elasticity of Marginal Utility of Consumption
- 2017
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Ingår i: The B.E. Journals in Economic Analysis & Policy. - : WALTER DE GRUYTER GMBH. - 2194-6108 .- 1935-1682. ; 17:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The popular approach to estimating the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption (EMUC) (Chetty 2006, "A New Method of Estimating Risk Aversion." American Economic Review 96 (5):1821-1834. doi:10.1257/aer.96.5.1821. http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.96.5.1821) is here extended by including household production. It is shown that this generalization of the model is important as omission of household production may lead to bias, as demonstrated in a numerical sensitivity analysis. An extended model with household production is used to derive new EMUC formulas. Empirical estimates based on current evidence of the included parameters suggest a lower bound for EMUC of about 0.9.
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| 10. |
- Asplund, Disa, 1985-, et al.
(författare)
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How Does Concern for Low-income Individuals Affect Optimal Public Transport Policy in a Small City?
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Transport Economics and Policy. - : University of Bath. - 0022-5258 .- 1754-5951. ; 56:3, s. 295-322
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper evaluates the impact of different sets of distributional weights on optimal bus fares and frequencies in the small Swedish city of Uppsala, with a two-way public transport demand per bus line of 200 pax/h in peak and 100 pax/h in off-peak. One result is that, compared with the welfareoptimal scenario without distributional weights, increasing the weights of the low-income group successively increases service frequencies. However, a more pronounced result is that a weight as low as 1.3 on low-income individuals' well-being (expressed in willingness to pay) is enough to justify a free-fare policy for this group.
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