The prospects are considered of deploying batteries and fuel cells in order to reduce the carbon emissions from various modes of transport. It is proposed that the government has not done enough to advance these technologies and that Britain is lagging behind other countries. The adequacy of Britain’s future supplies of energy is called into question.

While other research has shown that higher paid truck and bus drivers are safer, this is the first study showing why higher paid drivers are safer. We estimate the labour supply curve for long-haul truck drivers in the United States, applying two-stage least squares regression to a national survey of truck drivers. We start with the standard model of the labour supply curve and then develop two novel extensions of it, incorporating pay level and pay method, and testing the target earnings hypothesis. We distinguish between long-haul and short-haul jobs driving commercial motor vehicles. Truck and bus drivers choose between long-distance jobs requiring very long hours of work away from home and short-distance jobs generally requiring fewer hours. The labour supply curve exhibits a classic backward bending shape, reflecting drivers’ preference to work until they reach target earnings. Above target earnings, at a ‘safe rate’ for truck drivers, they trade labour for leisure, working fewer hours, leading to greater highway safety. Drivers work fewer hours at a higher pay rate and likely have less fatigue. Pay rates also have implications for driver health because worker health deteriorates as working time exceeds 40 hours.

The construction of the rail network in Spain was supported by public aid. A part of them were “subvenciones adicionales”, which came from the exemption of the payment of customs duties on the imports of railway equipment. The exact amount of these grants is only known after 1870 when they were rather small. In this paper, we quantified them for the period 1857-1886 in the company MZA, by then the largest in the country. Moreover, we estimate the costs of the construction of the railway lines of that company until 1869 and how much did each of the sources of funding, public and private contributed. The main conclusion is that in MZA the State’s grants were higher than the shareholders’ investment.

This paper explains the so-called «Spanish railways problem» as a consequence of the new competition that this traditional mean of transport suffered from the rapid development of the automobile industry. Road transportation more than any other factor was the cause of the financial difficulties of the railways companies before the Civil War. We also study the reaction of these firms and the failures of all measures that were taken.

This paper studies duration of inter-firm contracts in a transaction cost perspective. The aim of the paper is to test the propositions that can be derived from a transaction-cost framework. We built a non-truncated database representing the entire contractual relationships of Electricité de France (EDF) with its coal carriers and coal unloaders over the period 1977–1997. Section I explores factors that can explain the choice of contract duration. Section II describes the relationships between EDF and its suppliers. In Section III, we test and confirm most propositions derived from transaction-cost theory that relate contract duration to transaction characteristics. We believe this study to be the first attempt (1) to confirm transaction cost economics propositions using French data and (2) to endogenize asset specificity level at stake in transactions.