Ricerc@Sapienza

In this paper, we analytically study the performance of two topologies of high-speed rail (HSR) networks: isolated-corridors and grid networks. We evaluate how HSR configuration affects capacity of newly developed infrastructure, profits and social welfare by considering a number of factors, namely economies of traffic density, market size, operating cost and cost of capital. Our investigations focus on a social welfare-maximizing entity which provides HSR train services as well as develops infrastructure.

This paper addresses the problem of ranking growth episodes from a microeconomic perspective.
While most of the existing criteria, framed in the pro-poor growth tradition, are either based on anonymous
individuals or are used to identify them on the basis of their status in the initial period, this
paper proposes new criteria to evaluate growth, which are robust to the choice of the reference period
used to identify individuals. Suitable dominance conditions that can be used to rank alternative growth