The Cost of Traffic: Evidence from the London Congestion Charge
利用伦敦拥堵费政策实施，通过住房市场估计人们为避免交通拥堵的支付意愿，发现交通改善使区域内房主获得超过38亿英镑的意外收益。
This paper exploits the implementation of the London Congestion Charge (LCC) to provide credible estimates on the willingness to pay to avoid traffic using the housing market. This policy curtails road traffic by imposing a fee on anyone driving into the charge zone. My results show that the LCC is associated with significant improvement in traffic conditions and housing values. Instrumenting local traffic conditions with the enforcement of the LCC, and limiting the analysis to properties proximate to the charge boundary, I find that the elasticity of housing values with respect to traffic is -0.30. These findings suggest that the consequential improvement in traffic conditions due to the LCC has generated substantial windfall of more than £3.8 billion for homeowners in the zone.