|Talks|

Behavioral Responses to Time-Varying Congestion Pricing: A Natural Experiment from New York City

Visiting speaker
In-person
Past Talk
Hitanshu Pandit
Northeastern University
Jan 22, 2026
1:30 am
EST
Jan 22, 2026
1:30 am
In-person
Portsoken Street
London, E1 8PH, UK
The Roux Institute
Room
100 Fore Street
Portland, ME 04101
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Network Science Institute
11th floor
177 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Network Science Institute
2nd floor
Room
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
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Talk recording

I study within-day behavioral responses to time-varying congestion pricing using New York City's Congestion Relief Zone (CRZ), implemented on January 5, 2025. Exploiting the CRZ's geographic boundary together with sharp, pre-announced toll schedule thresholds, I estimate causal effects using a difference-in-discontinuities (DiD-RD) design applied to high-frequency mobility data on hourly visits to points of interest (POIs). Across the four primary time boundaries implied by the toll schedule, I find evidence of temporal substitution concentrated at a single threshold: at the weekday 5 a.m. transition into peak pricing, visits during the discounted overnight window (midnight-4 a.m.) increase by approximately 5.9 percent relative to post-5 a.m. visits in the CRZ, compared with a control city and the pre-policy period. In contrast, estimates at the weekday evening boundary and both weekend boundaries are small and precisely near zero. Placebo tests using earlier implementation dates yield no detectable effects, and shifting the cutoff by one hour weakens the weekday-morning estimate, suggesting that re-timing is concentrated at this boundary.
About the speaker
Hitanshu Pandit is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. His research spans labor economics, urban policy, and health economics. He is passionate about leveraging advanced econometric methods and big data (especially mobile-device GPS data) analytics to generate evidence that informs local and state policy decisions and thereby driving meaningful impact in policy spheres that matter most to communities.
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Jan 22, 2026