Superstitions, Street Traffic, and Subjective Well-Being

摘要: Congestion plays a central role in urban and transportation economics. Existing estimates of congestion costs rely on stated or revealed preferences studies. We explore complementary measure based self-reported happiness. Exploiting quasi-random variation daily Beijing that arises because superstitions about the number four, we estimate strong effect When benchmarking this against relationship between income happiness compute implied are several times larger than conventional estimates. Several factors, including value reliability externalities non-travelers, can reconcile our alternative with existing literature.