Car traffic, habit persistence, cross-sectional dependence, and spatial heterogeneity: New insights using French departmental data

J.Paul Elhorst, Jean-Loup Madre and Alain Pirotte

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2020, vol. 132, issue C, 614-632

Abstract: This paper adopts a dynamic general nesting spatial panel data model with common factors to explore the effect of population density, real household income per capita, car fleet per capita, and real price of gasoline on departmental traffic per light vehicle in France over the period 1990–2009. Spatial heterogeneity is modeled by a translog function in the first three explanatory variables, which are dominated by variation in the cross-sectional domain, while the real price of gasoline, which is dominated by variation in the time domain, is treated as an observable common factor. Additional unobservable common factors are controlled for by principal components with heterogenous coefficients, building on previous work of Shi and Lee (2017a), thereby, generalizing the dynamic spatial panel data model with spatial and time period fixed applied in recent studies. It is found that the spatial lag in the dependent variable becomes insignificant due to these extensions. This paper explains the wider implications of this finding for spatial econometric modeling of cross-sectional dependence. In addition, the elasticities of the first three explanatory variables are shown to vary across space and time and to follow a plausible structure. Among other, an important result is that the long run income elasticity of car traffic diminished from 1.0 in 1990 to 0.4 in 2003, and then remained almost constant until the end of our sample period in 2009, i.e., during the peak-car traffic period.

Keywords: Car traffic; Panel data; Cross-sectional dependence; Common factors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 R40 R41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856418314885
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:132:y:2020:i:c:p:614-632

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2019.11.016

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().