Acela Vs Airlines

This paper quantifies competition between high-speed rail and airlines in the northeastern United States. A difference-in-differences approach is utilized to exploit the exogenous variation of Acela high-speed rail market entry on December 11th, 2000. The difference-in-differences approach showed that Acela entry reduced average arrival delays by approximately 2.38 minutes on treated routes, relative to control routes. The causal effect on airfares and average arrival delay was not statistically significant at conventional levels. Further research is needed to better understand the differential effects of HSR entry in North America.