Browsing by Author "Basso, Leonardo J."

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    A practical approach for curbing congestion and air pollution: Driving restrictions with toll and vintage exemptions
    (2021) Basso, Leonardo J.; Montero, Juan-Pablo; Sepulveda, Felipe
    Congestion and local air pollution continue to be a serious problem in many cities around the world, partly because of an increasing and ageing car fleet. Unfortunately, the use of pricing schemes for handling these externalities, such as congestion and pollution charges, still face much resistance. To cope with it, Carlos F. Daganzo advanced an ingenious hybrid scheme that supposedly leaves everybody better off: driving restrictions with toll exemptions. We extend Daganzo's idea to include vintage exemptions in an effort to also control for the pollution externality. We then test for its Pareto-improving property using Santiago as a case study. We find the latter not to hold in that low-income drivers are strictly worse off: the gain from faster car travel in days of no restriction is not enough to compensate the loss from switching to public transport in days of restriction. To make all individuals better off, the entire toll collection ought to be recycled back into the public transport system, lowering its fares and improving its quality. If so, the most ambitious hybrid restriction format -a 5-day-a-week restriction with vintage thresholds during fall and winter- reports per-year net benefits of around 1.2 billion dollars (or 0.5% of the country's GDP), 58% of which comes from lighter traffic and the remaining 42% from cleaner air.
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    Effects of asymmetric information on airport congestion management mechanisms
    (2019) Aravena, Olivia; Basso, Leonardo J.; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés
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    Infection with SARS-CoV-2 variant Gamma (P.1) in Chile increased ICU admission risk three to five-fold
    (2023) Sauré, Denis; Rizzo, Alessandro; Neira, Ignasi; Goic, Marcel; O’Ryan, Miguel; Torres, Juan P.; Bruhn, Alejandro; Ferres Garrido, Marcela Viviana; Angulo Troncoso, Jenniffer Alexandra; Vera Alarcon, Maria Magdalena; Basso, Leonardo J.
    The 2021 wave of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Chile was characterized by an explosive increase in ICU admissions, which disproportionately affected individuals younger than 60 years. This second wave was also accompanied by an explosive increase in Gamma (P.1) variant detections and the massive vaccine rollout. We unveil the role the Gamma variant played in stressing the use of critical care, by developing and calibrating a queueing model that uses data on new onset cases and actual ICU occupancy, symptom’s onset to ICU admission interval, ICU length-of-stay, genomic surveillance, and vaccine effectiveness. Our model shows that infection with the Gamma (P.1) variant led to a 3.5–4.7-fold increase in ICU admission for people younger than 60 years. This situation occurred on top of the already reported higher infection rate of the Gamma variant. Importantly, our results also strongly suggest that the vaccines used in Chile (inactivated mostly, but also an mRNA), were able to curb Gamma variant ICU admission over infections.
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    Maximization of equilibrium utility vs minimization of resources in the urban equilibrium
    (2024) Basso, Leonardo J.; Pezoa, Raúl; Silva, Hugo E.; CEDEUS (Chile)
    We study welfare and the role of absentee landlords’ rent capture in one of the building blocks of urban economics: the monocentric city model. If only a fraction (but not all) of the absentee landlords’ land rents is captured and then redistributed, the market outcome minimizes resource usage but does not maximize residents’ utility. Therefore, when the utility-maximizing planner is unable to implement full taxation of land rents, she would prefer to intervene in the market outcome, while a planner minimizing resources would not. This difference implies that policy prescriptions crucially depend on the chosen welfare function (utility vs resources) and the land rent taxation rate.
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    Monopoly regulation under asymmetric information: prices versus quantities
    (2017) Basso, Leonardo J.; Figueroa González, Nicolás Andrés; Vásquez, Jorge
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    Public transport and urban structure
    (2021) Basso, Leonardo J. ; Navarro, Matias ; Silva, Hugo E. ; CEDEUS (Chile)
    Public transport is central to commuting in most cities. This paper studies the role of public transportation in shaping the urban structure. Its main contribution is to propose a tractable model as a tool to study urban regulations and transport policies in the long-run. Using the classic monocentric city framework, we model public transport as a mode that can only be accessed by walking to a set of stops. By incorporating a discrete transport mode choice and income heterogeneity, the model remains simple yet can reproduce non-monotonous urban gradients observed in cities with public transport, and well-observed spatial patterns of sorting by income and use of public transport. For example, it can reproduce an inverted U-shape of transit usage along the city. To highlight the relevance of the model, we study the effects of pricing pollution externalities together with extending the public transportation network on the urban structure.
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    The diverse impacts of COVID-19 on electricity demand: The case of Chile
    (2022) Sanchez-Lopez, Miguel; Moreno, Rodrigo; Alvarado, Diego; Suazo-Martinez, Carlos; Negrete-Pincetic, Matias; Olivares, Daniel; Sepulveda, Carlos; Otarola, Hector; Basso, Leonardo J.
    This paper analyzes the impacts of the first wave of COVID-19 (March 2020 -September 2020) on the electricity demand of different types of consumers in Chile, including residential, commercial, and industrial demand. We leverage data from 230 thousand smart meters of residential and commercial consumers in 32 communes of Santiago (the capital city of Chile), which allows us to investigate the evolution of their demands with an hourly temporal resolution. Additionally, we use demand data of large industrial consumers provided by the Chilean system operator to study the impact of the pandemic on different economic sectors. This paper demonstrates that the COVID-19 pandemic, and the associated containment measures, have featured a drastically different impact on the various types of consumers in Chile. In particular, we show that the demand of residential consumers has increased throughout the first wave, even when we isolate the effects of the pandemic from those related to weather. Furthermore, we study how these effects change in different communes of Santiago, contrasting our findings with the socio-economic levels of the population. In effect, we find different demand response patterns depending on the socio-economic background of consumers. We also show that commercial demand has significantly declined due to the containment measures implemented and that the hospitality and construction economic sectors have been the most affected in the country.
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    The path towards herd immunity: Predicting COVID-19 vaccination uptake through results from a stated choice study across six continents
    (2022) Hess, Stephane; Lancsar, Emily; Mariel, Petr; Meyerhoff, Juergen; Song, Fangqing; Van den Broek-Altenburg, Eline; Alaba, Olufunke A.; Amaris, Gloria; Arellana, Julian; Basso, Leonardo J.; Benson, Jamie; Bravo-Moncayo, Luis; Chanel, Olivier; Choi, Syngjoo; Sourd, Romain Crastes Dit; Cybis, Helena Bettella; Dorner, Zack; Falco, Paolo; Garzon-Perez, Luis; Glass, Kathryn; Guzman, Luis A.; Huang, Zhiran; Huynh, Elisabeth; Kim, Bongseop; Konstantinus, Abisai; Konstantinus, Iyaloo; Larranaga, Ana Margarita; Longo, Alberto; Loo, Becky P. Y.; Oehlmann, Malte; O'Neill, Vikki; Ortuzar Salas, Juan De Dios; Sanz, Maria Jose; Sarmiento, Olga L.; Moyo, Hazvinei Tamuka; Tucker, Steven; Wang, Yacan; Wang, Yu; Webb, Edward J. D.; Zhang, Junyi; Zuidgeest, Mark H. P.