The Location Effects of Alternative Road-Pricing Policies

Since the early 1970s, urban economists have recognized the importance of a general equilibrium model of the urban economy. Initially, however, they developed such models only for monocentric cities in which all jobs were assumed to stay in a central business district (CBD). Thus, although the analytical solution of the monocentric city model yielded many theoretical insights, it remained empirically inappropriate and difficult to justify in policy application. Early contributions to the general equilibrium model of a monocentric city included Mills (1972), Dixit (1973), and Sullivan (1986), who developed the most complete models all solved numerically. A parallel line of developments that started in the early 1970s led to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) urban simulation model (Ingram, Kain, and Ginn 1972; Kain and Apgar 1985; Kain, Apgar, and Ginn 1976, 1977, 1982) and the Urban Institute Model (Struyk and Turner 1986; Turner and Struyk 1983; Vanski and Ozanne 1978). These two urban simulation models were applied primarily to the study of housing market issues, but they did not