Author (Your Name)

Kebing Li, Colby CollegeFollow

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. Economics Dept.

Advisor(s)

Timothy Hubbard

Second Advisor

Lindsey Novak

Abstract

How to manage the relationship between Uber and the local taxi industry has been a long-lasting and hot topic for most of the major cities around the world. Whether Uber is stealing money from and undermining the local taxi drivers or it is beneficial for public transportation has no certain conclusions. In this paper, we focus on the city of New York, where both Uber and traditional Yellow Taxi play important roles in public transportation and city culture in general, and we are trying to investigate the factors that are going to affect Uber and Yellow Taxi pickups in New York City. Among many socio-economic factors, we especially want to see what role crime would play in this setting since Uber has claimed that unlike yellow taxi drivers, Uber drivers do not have geographical discrimination based on the number of crime occurs in a given neighborhood. We use the data from April to September in 2014 for both Uber and Yellow Taxi pickups, and socio-economic data in 2014 by census tract to develop several econometric models treating each census tract as an individual observation.

Keywords

Optimal Structure, Spatial Econometrics, Zero-Inflated Poisson Model, Taxi Industry, For-Hired Vehicles, Ride-Sharing Services

Click below to download supplemental content.

thesis_analysis.R (43 kB)
R script for data analysis

Data.xlsx (630 kB)
Cleaned Data

All_joins.xlsx (1906 kB)

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