Associating ridesourcing with road safety outcomes: Insights from Austin, Texas

Improving road safety and setting targets for reducing traffic-related crashes and deaths are highlighted as part of the United Nations sustainable development goals and worldwide vision zero efforts. The advent of transportation network companies and ridesourcing expands mobility options in cities and may impact road safety outcomes. We analyze the effects of ridesourcing use on road crashes, injuries, fatalities, and driving while intoxicated (DWI) offenses in Travis County, Texas. Our approach leverages real-time ridesourcing volume to explain variation in road safety outcomes. Spatial panel data models with fixed-effects are deployed to examine whether the use of ridesourcing is significantly associated with road crashes and other safety metrics. Our results suggest that for a 10% increase in ridesourcing trips, we expect a 0.12% decrease in road crashes, a 0.25% decrease in road injuries, and a 0.36% decrease in DWI offenses in Travis County. On the other hand, ridesourcing use is not significantly associated with road fatalities. This study augments existing work because it moves beyond binary indicators of ridesourcing availability and analyzes crash and ridesourcing trips patterns within an urbanized area rather than their metropolitan-level variation. Contributions include developing a data-rich approach for assessing the impacts of ridesourcing use on the transportation system’s safety, which may serve as a template for future analyses for other cities. Our findings provide feedback to policymakers by clarifying associations between ridesourcing use and traffic safety and uncover the potential to achieve safer mobility systems with transportation network companies.

Migration and Democratization in Brazil: The Case of Electoral Participation and Competition

Deepening democratization in Brazil has coincided with sustained flows of domestic migration, which raises an important question of whether migration deepens or depresses democratic development in migrant-sending regions. Whereas earlier perspectives have viewed migration as a political “brain drain,” we contend that out-migration can generate resources that promote democratic processes back home. We investigate the role of migration in two aspects of democratization: electoral participation and competition. The analyses are based on spatial panel data models of mayoral election results across all municipalities between 1996 and 2012. The results show that migration increases electoral participation and competition in migrant-sending localities in Brazil. This study also identifies the sociopolitical context that conditions the impact of migration: the effect is most often present in the context of rural-urban migration and is more pronounced in sending localities with less democratic political structures. Moreover, using spatial network models, we find evidence for the transmission of political remittances from migration destination municipalities to origin municipalities. The present study extends the research on the migration-development nexus to the political arena, thus demonstrating the value of integrating demographic processes into explanations of political change.

Development of a Win Production Function and Evaluation of Cross-Sectional Dependence

We consider correlations between pairs of teams when deriving a win production function for professional baseball teams. Previous empirical studies derived win production estimates based on the assumption that the error terms were independent, but this is not reasonable given that a win is a relative output. The total number of wins per season is fixed: all teams share wins, in that a win for one team is a loss for the opponent. We applied spatial panel data models to a Major League Baseball dataset to control for cross-sectional dependence. A strong negative dependence was found; our estimates differ somewhat from previous estimates that assumed cross-sectional independence. JEL: L83, L80, Z20

Spatial changes in entrepreneurship in relation to economic crisis and recovery. Insights from Romanian counties

Trying to explain the sources of persisting high inequalities in the regional distribution of entrepreneurship in Romania, this paper puts a spotlight on the spatial interactions among neighbour regions in a spatial modelling framework. We explored the interplay of factors that inform the territorial distribution of SMEs by employing various spatial panel data models that not only provided better estimations of the parameters, but also removed the cross – sectional dependence detected in our previous research using classic panel models. We found that the existing regional inequalities in entrepreneurial activity are strongly associated with differences in economic development, gross investments, research and development, age of the population, and and differences in regional resilience to economic crises. Additional useful information was brought about by the computation of direct and indirect effects of these factors of influence.