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Cities provide the benefits that come with economic density but often face congested traffic and high unemployment. In this paper, we study economy-wide and distributional implications of congestion pricing in the presence of agglomeration externalities and unemployment. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model to show that indirect effects of time-invariant congestion tolls can lead to welfare losses for low-skilled urban residents by changing commuting patterns of high-skilled workers. Next, we reveal a set of policy designs that improve welfare across space and worker skill levels by combining time-sensitive road pricing, transport network capacity expansions, and toll revenue redistribution.
Vandyck et al. (Fri,) studied this question.