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WP 21-01.

Road traffic is necessary for a successful functioning of market economy and its volume is positively correlated with economic development. However, its rapid increase fostered by economic growth is problematic as road traffic results in numerous externalities. The externalities resulting from traffic are costs that are created but not born by motorists that create them. Among these are such ‘classic’ externalities as congestion, air pollution and noise, traffic accidents, carbon emissions, etc. However, the recent evidence suggests that apart from these typical traffic externalities there may be many more non-obvious ones, e.g. longer emergency response times and resulting higher average monetary damages from fires (Brent and Beland, 2020). Traffic externalities can be internal to transportation system meaning that they affect motorists only, such as congestion, car crashes, wear and tear of road infrastructure, etc. But many externalities are external to transportation system and affect non-users, such as air and noise pollution, carbon emissions etc. Therefore, it is crucial to find the best tools to deal with the road transport externalities.

Keywords : transport economics,

Revue économique, 30(2), 420-448.

In most European countries, poor cohabiting adults are eligible to lower per capita social assistance benefits than poor adults living alone, as they are supposed to benefit from economies of scale in household expenses as housing, heating costs, etc. In this paper, we show that this aspect of social assistance varies strongly within Europe and use this variation to identify a possible causality of social assistance scheme parameters on cohabitation decisions. Our statistical analysis suggests that high benefits for cohabitants decrease the number of poor one-person households significantly. We discuss the consequences of this result on government expenditures and touch upon externalities that strengthen the case for higher cohabitant amounts in countries with strongly differentiated rates.

Keywords : Guaranteed Minimum Income, Cohabitation, Divorce, Public transfers,