Transportation Economists Gather for ITEA 2025 Annual School and Conference

The Transportation Center hosted the annual school and conference of the International Transportation Economics Association (ITEA) on June 23-27, 2025. This marked the event’s return to North America after a gap of twelve years (the 2013 event was also hosted at Northwestern.)

The annual school enrolled 33 graduate students, faculty and professionals from 16 different countries. It was held in the Transportation Center building. It consisted of a series of eight lectures and tutorials conducted by some of the most prominent researchers in transportation economics over the course of two and a half days. The school provided a high-quality introduction to academic research on transportation economics, including many recent advances in the field.

The conference on the following two and a half days was attended by 150 economists from 22 different countries. 117 papers were presented. The event was held in the Kellogg Global Hub. The keynote speaker was Professor Dave Donaldson of MIT who spoke about the use of new data sources to evaluate transportation infrastructure projects. In particular, the use of quantitative spatial models where data are collected on the distribution of economic activity at different locations. Emeritus Professor Ken Small of the University of California, Irvine received an honorary membership of ITEA, an organization that he helped found, and gave an address discussing how the tools of the emerging field of behavioral economics can be used by transportation economists.

Northwestern doctorial students were able to benefit from attending the school and conference and six of them, plus two of our undergraduates, presented their work.

Attendees also enjoyed social activities that culminated in a dinner cruise on Lake Michigan.

The local organizing committee was chaired by Transportation Center affiliate Professor Ian Savage in cooperation with Professor Meghan Busse of the Kellogg School of Management and the ITEA program chair Professor Jonathan Hall of the University of Alabama (who is a TC alum as he was a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern from 2012-2014).