Evaluating the car ownership control policy in Shanghai: a structural vector auto-regression approach

Suwei Feng () and Qiang Li
Additional contact information
Suwei Feng: Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Transportation, 2018, vol. 45, issue 1, No 11, 205-232

Abstract: Abstract Beginning in 1986, Shanghai has implemented an interesting car ownership policy, namely an auction of the right to register private cars. In this paper, we propose a structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) approach to characterize the price formation process and to evaluate the performance of the Shanghai auction. We find three key results: (1) the price formation mechanism remained intact when the auction switched from on-site bidding to the two-stage format in 2008; (2) before 2008, short-term price fluctuations could be managed by varying the quota; after 2008, such manipulation ceased to be effective; (3) the number of bidders, or demand, ultimately drove the price in later years, casting doubt on the viability of the new price-controlled procedure that has created more than 250,000 bidders in waiting until April 2016. We also analyze how annual socio-economic variables affect quota, price, and the number of bidders using a simultaneous equations model. Due to data limitations, such an analysis is less conclusive. We argue that the SVAR framework can be improved and applied to other cities in evaluating their car ownership practices.

Keywords: Car ownership control; Structural VAR; License plate quota auction; Efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11116-016-9733-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:transp:v:45:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11116-016-9733-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-016-9733-3

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().