Herbert Mohring (1928 – June 4, 2012) was a transportation economist who taught at the University of Minnesota from 1961–1994.^[1][2] He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959,^[3] with a thesis on the life insurance industry supervised by Robert Solow.^[4]

He is widely known for his identification of what was dubbed the Mohring effect of increasing returns in public transportation (see: Mohring (1972) for details).

Mohring and Harwitz (1962) also showed that the revenues from the first-best congestion tax exactly cover the capacity costs (which include depreciation and capital costs, but not investment costs) of highways when highways possess constant returns to scale.

Selected works

• Mohring, Herbert, Optimization and Scale Economies in Urban Bus Transportation, American Economic Review 62, no. 4 (September 1972): 591-604.
• Mohring, Herbert, The Peak Load Problem with Increasing Returns and Pricing Constraints, American Economic Review 60, no. 4 (September 1970): 693-705.
• Mohring, H. and Harwitz, M., Highway Benefits: An Analytical Framework, Ch 2, pp 57–90. (1962)