NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITYTRANSPORTATION CENTER

Submit Abstract

The abstract submission portal is open from January 10 - February 28, 2025. 

 You are invited to submit an extended abstract (2-4 pages or 400-1000 words).

1. Go to https://editorialexpress.com/conference/ITEA2025
2. Log in with your existing Conference Maker credentials or create an account.
3. An extended abstract of 2-4 pages or 400-1000 words is required.
4. Option A (preferred) upload a pdf of your extended abstract in the "enter your submission" section. Your pdf abstract should contain title, author(s), research question, methodology, and expected results.
5. Option B: enter the text of your extended abstract in the text box (note formatting will be lost).
6. ITEA covers all modes, intermodal analysis, and all aspects of transportation economics. To facilitate division of labor within the scientific committee please select the primary mode your abstract deals with from the “area” pulldown:

• Aviation
• Maritime
• Rail (freight and intercity passenger)
• Road (including road freight, cycling, and parking)
• Urban mass transit (bus, metro, light rail, local rail)
• All other abstracts

7. No need to enter any keywords or upload any slides

 

Please note that an author may only present one paper at the conference. If multiple papers by the same author are accepted, either one must be withdrawn or presented by a co-author.

 

 Prizes

 Two prizes will be awarded at the ITEA Annual Conference: the Best Paper by a Junior Researcher and the Best Overall Paper.

 Eligibility requirements for the Best Paper by a Junior Researcher prize:

• The presenter must be the junior researcher.
• The junior researcher cannot have received their PhD more than four calendar years ago.
• Coauthors may be senior scholars, but they cannot belong to the Scientific Committee.
• In case of coauthored papers with senior researchers, the junior researcher is requested to accompany their paper with a statement explaining their precise contribution.
• When submitting a paper, the junior researcher must declare on the title page of the paper that they are a junior researcher and that they want to be considered for the prize.
• A person who declares themselves to be a junior researcher remains eligible to win the Best Overall Paper prize that year.
• No person who has won the Best Paper by a Junior Researcher prize can win it again, but they are eligible to win the Best Overall Paper prize in the future.
• The Scientific Committee may decide not to award the Best Paper by a Junior Researcher prize in a given year.

 Eligibility requirements for the Best Overall Paper prize:

• Neither the presenter nor any coauthor can belong to the Scientific Committee.
• A member of the Executive Committee or School Committee not belonging to the Scientific Committee can be presenter or coauthor of a paper winning the Best Overall Paper prize.
• When submitting a paper, the presenter must declare on the title page of the paper that they want to be considered for the prize.
• Previous winners of the Best Overall Paper prize are eligible to win it again.
• The Scientific Committee may decide not to award the Best Overall Paper prize in a given year.

 

Register

The registration system will open April 1, 2025. Early-bird discounted registration will be available until the first week of May 2025.  

• ITEA members receive a $75 discount from the listed fees
• Registration after the first week of May will be $150 higher

Combined School and Conference
Regular	$1275
Full-time U.S./Canada Students	$850
Full-time Students from other Countries	$695
School Only
Regular	$900
Full-time U.S./Canada Students	$775
Full-time Students from other Countries	$635
Conference Only
Regular	$825
Full-time U.S./Canada Students	$525
Full-time Students from other Countries	$435

 

Fees for the School include all meals and refreshment breaks from Monday lunchtime through Wednesday lunchtime. Fees for the conference include lunch on Thursday and Friday, dinner and social events on Wednesday and Thursday evening, and mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks.

Annual School

The aim of the ITEA Annual School is to provide young researchers as well as practitioners with a high-quality introduction to academic research on transportation economics, including many recent advances in the field. The School’s program consists of a series of lectures and tutorials conducted by some of the most prominent researchers in transportation economics.

Session 1: First-best Road Pricing

Learning Objectives:

• Learn how to model first-best road pricing.
• Understand static and dynamic model of congestion.
• Understand criteria for optimal capacity investment.

Instructor:

Jonathan Hall (University of Alabama, USA)

Personal Website

Jonathan Hall is an applied microeconomist. His research strives to improve urban transportation systems by focusing on three broad themes. First, understanding and addressing traffic congestion. Second, evaluating the impacts of new transportation technologies on cities. Third, improving transportation safety. His research uses a variety of theoretical and empirical methods, including structural and reduced-form approaches, to address these themes. He is the chair of the ITEA Scientific Committee.

 

Session 2: Urban Public Transportation

Learning Objectives:

• Gain an understanding of the economics of public transportation.
• Learn how to model a transit system by highlighting its main specific features and the interaction between public and private transportation.
• Appreciate that some costs are born by operators while other costs are borne by users.
• Understand that economies of scale and density can derive both from the production function of the firm and from the costs incurred by riders (“the Mohring effect”).
• Learn how to model first-best fares, frequences and network design.
• Learn how externalities such as congestion or crowding shape the efficient outcome.

Instructor:

Leonardo Basso (Universidad de Chile, Chile)

Personal Website

Leo Basso’s research interests are aviation economics, urban transportation, urban economics, industrial economics and antitrust. He is the co-editor of Economics of Transportation, the official journal of the ITEA. He is a member the Chilean National Academy of Sciences              .

  

 

Session 3: Second-best Road Pricing

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the technical, political, and societal constraints on implementation of first-best road pricing.
• Learn about other market failures and distortions that coexist with road congestion.
• Understand how second-best analysis becomes the relevant framework when there are practical policy constraints and other distortions.
• Learn about possible second-best transportation policies and the methods that can be used to design and evaluate these alternative policies.

Instructor:

Erik Verhoef (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Personal Website

Erik Verhoef’s research focuses on efficiency and equity aspects of transportation and urban spatial systems. Important research themes include second-best regulation, network and spatial analysis, the tension between efficiency and equity and social acceptability, behavioral modelling, and policy evaluation. He is the current president of ITEA and is a past founding co-editor of Economics of Transportation.

 

Session 4: Environmental Economics and Transportation

Learning Objectives:

• Learning the distinction between local (air pollution, noise) and global environmental issues (climate) that require different governance and policy instruments.
• Learn about static and dynamic environmental costs.
• Appreciate the effects of different policy instruments including taxes, permits, standards, and land use regulation.
• Understand the role of international treaties and energy market interactions to address climate issues.
• Understand how issues and instruments vary by mode including both surface transportation and aviation.

Instructor:

Stef Proost (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Personal Website

Stef Proost is an emeritus professor of transport, environmental and energy economics at KU Leuven. His recent research focuses on decarbonization of the transportation sector (cars, trucks, aviation, maritime) and the political economy of transportation policies. He has been advising international and national governments on transport, environmental and energy policies.

 

 Session 5: Transportation Cost-Benefit Analysis

Learning Objectives:

• Explore the various aspects of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in the context of evaluating and justifying transportation investments.
• Understand technical considerations such as accessibility, the logsum, and the use of consumer surplus as a measure of benefits.
• Explore how to evaluate the benefits gained by new users.
• Appreciate the reliability and robustness of CBA and its overall significance in decision-making.
• Understand how issues such as project cost overruns and demand shortfalls present challenges in the evaluation process.
• Learn how equity, including equity in travel time savings, is treated within CBA.
• Reflect on the broader implications and complexities associated with the application of CBA in transport investment decision processes.

Instructor:

Maria Börjesson (VTI - The Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute and Linköpings Universität, Sweden)

Personal website

Maria Börjesson’s research interests include transportation cost-benefit analysis, appraisal, and sustainability. Her research has dealt with distribution and equity effects including the role of gender, and the evaluation of non-market aspects of transportation. She has also analyzed policy and pricing for all modes including active mobility and cycling. She is also active in survey design, choice experiments and travel behavioral modeling. She is the immediate past-president of the ITEA.

 

Session 6 has two variants that participants can choose when registering.

Session 6a: Empirical Tutorial

Learning Objectives:

• Engage in introductory exercises focusing on either linear regression or discrete choice models.
• Learn to work with either R or STATA.
• Gain experience in estimating linear regression or discrete choice models, or familiarize yourself with R or STATA.

Instructor:

Stefanie Peer (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)

Personal Website

Stefanie Peer is a professor at the Department for Socioeconomics and head of the Research Institute for Spatial and Real Estate Economics at WU Vienna. Her research concerns mobility and time use behavior of individuals, usually employing quantitative empirical approaches and discrete choice models. She heads the ITEA school committee.

 

Session 6b: Roundtable Discussions

Learning Objectives:

• Engage in roundtable meetings with one of the instructors at the school.
• Delve into discussions about your own research or related topics.

Instructors:
All of the school instructors.

 

Session 7: Travel Time Variability

Learning Objectives:

• Learn about the microeconomic theory underlying the quantification and valuation of travel time variability.
• Explore empirical examples that support the theory.
• Understand how the physics of travel flow affects travel time variability.

Instructor:

Mogens Fosgerau (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Personal Website

Mogens Fosgerau is a mathematical economist. His research deals with discrete choice theory and practice, travel time variability and scheduling, route choice, traffic congestion, urban form, and the value of travel time. He was founding co-editor of Economics of Transportation. He is also active in the Danish transport and climate policy debate.

 

Session 8: Economics of Airline Networks

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the implications of hub-and-spoke networks in airlines’ strategic decisions.
• Learn how to analyzes the effect of airline partnerships such as alliances, joint ventures, and mergers in the presence of network effects.
• Learn about the difference approaches when network carriers, regional carriers and low-cost carriers decide to serve new routes either directly or indirectly.
• Learn how to analyzes the effects of airport congestion and the optimal design of landing fees.

Instructor:

Ricardo Flores-Fillol (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain)

Personal Website

Ricardo Flores-Fillol’s research focuses on industrial organization, air transportation economics, and urban economics. In particular, he has analyzed the diverse types of competition in the airline industry and the economics of airline alliances. He has served as chair of the Scientific Committee at ITEA and is currently the treasurer of the Association.

 

The instructors have accepted the offers to teach and specified their topics. However, topics and instructors are subject to change in the event of unexpected instructor illness or travel difficulties.

 

 

 

Conference

The aim of the ITEA Annual Conference is to promote scientific excellence in the field of transportation economics and to provide a forum for scientific exchange. Research presented at the conference covers both theory and empirical work, including all transport modes and a wide range of research methodologies.

Keynote Speaker

 

 

 

 

We are pleased to announce that Professor Dave Donaldson, the Class of 1949 Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the conference keynote address.

He is a renowned economist whose teaching and research deals with various aspects of trade, including the impact of improvements in transportation infrastructure. His work includes “Railroads of the Raj: Estimating the Impact of Transportation Infrastructure” (American Economic Review, 2018) and "Railroads and American Economic Growth: A ‘Market Access’ Approach" (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2016, joint with Rick Hornbeck).

He has received numerous prestigious awards including the 2017 John Bates Clark Medal given by the American Economic Association to the US-based economist “under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” He has served as a co-editor at Econometrica and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A native of Toronto, Canada, he obtained an undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford University and a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.

 

Accomodations

Accommodation information will be updated in March 2025.

We have found that participants can obtain better rates by directly booking with hotels rather than being part of a block booking. There are five major hotels in downtown Evanston, which are all 15-20 minutes’ walk from the School and Conference venues.

	Distance from Campus (miles)	Star Rating	Rooms	Breakfast Included?	Typical Rate excluding tax (13.5%)
Hilton Orrington	0.3	4	269	No	$162
Graduate Evanston	0.4	4	119	No	$154
Hyatt House	0.4	3	114	Yes	$159
Hilton Garden Inn	0.6	3	159	No	$154
Holiday Inn	0.6	3	159	No	$139

 All properties offer complimentary Wi-Fi.

Shared rooms at the same rates are available that will lower the cost. This may be attractive for graduate students.

 

 

Location

Travel and Directions

Chicago O'Hare International Airport is the closest and most convenient airport to the conference site. Taxi and public transportation is available, with a travel time of 35-40 minutes. Chicago Midway Airport is further away, but there is a public transportation link.

The School will be held in the Ruan Conference Center on the lower level of The Transportation Center building at 600 Foster Street.

https://maps.northwestern.edu/facility/65

The conference will be held in the Kellogg Global Hub (business school building), 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston.

https://maps.northwestern.edu/facility/659

For detailed travel information including travel from the airports see:

https://economics.northwestern.edu/about/contact/directions.html

Weather

Chicago can be hot in late June. The average high temperature is 83 F (28 C) and the average low 64 F (18 C). It is often quite humid. However, the conference is right on the shore of Lake Michigan and there is usually a cooling breeze in the afternoon. All conference facilities are air conditioned. Thunderstorms are not uncommon, but any rainfall is usually brief.

Disability Statement

The school and conference venues are equipped with elevators and fully accessible in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wi-Fi

Eduroam is available and additional Wi-Fi access will be made available for those who do not have access to Eduroam.

Bring the Family / Stay for a While

Evanston is located on the shores of Lake Michigan, 12 miles north of downtown Chicago. In Evanston, you can:

• Go to the sandy beaches
• Relax on the beautiful lake front campus
• Stroll through neighborhoods of Victorian homes
• Enjoy a diverse set of dining options
• Take the train for an evening under the stars at the outdoor music festival at Ravinia Park

There are public transportation links to downtown Chicago by commuter train and subway/elevated mass transit rail. In Chicago you can:

• Visit the world-famous Art Institute of Chicago and other museums
• Go to the viewing deck of one of the skyscrapers
• Take a boat trip on the river or a walking tour to view the world-famous architecture
• Visit a blues club
• See a baseball game on the north or south sides
• Visit Millenium Park and view Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (better known as “The Bean”)
• Walk in the lake front parks and visit the free zoo
• Walk out on Navy Pier and perhaps take a cruise on Lake Michigan
• Travel to suburb Oak Park to view the famous houses by architect Frank Lloyd Wright
• Go shopping on State Street or Michigan Avenue
• Attend a theatre production
• Eat in world class restaurants
• Take an extended trip before or after the conference to the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, Indiana or Michigan