We analyze welfare implications of policies promoting environmentally friendly vehicles employing rich Swiss micro-data on 23,000 newly purchased cars and their buyers. Our estimates reveal substantial income heterogeneity in price elasticity and electric vehicle (EV) adoption. While CO2 levies...

We identify and examine a novel welfare channel of fuel economy standards through the in-teraction with public transit and households’ location choices. A stricter emission standard for cars decreases the marginal cost of driving and triggers a shift in modal choice from public to private...

This paper explores the effect of airline emissions charges on airfares, airline service quality, aircraft design features, and network structure, using a detailed and realistic theoretical model of competing duopoly airlines. These impacts are derived by analyzing the effects of an increase in...

Our main message is that it is optimal to use less coal and more oil once one takes account of coal being a backstop which emits much more CO2 than oil. The way of achieving this is to have a steeply rising carbon tax during the initial oil-only phase, a less-steeply rising carbon tax during the...

Least-squares estimates of the response of gasoline consumption to a change in the gasoline price are biased toward zero, given the endogeneity of gasoline prices. A seemingly natural solution to this problem is to instrument for gasoline prices using gasoline taxes, but this approach tends to...

Using three years of data from the 47 prefectures of Japan, we estimate behavior of households who simultaneously make discrete decisions about vehicle ownership and continuous decisions about driving distance. We use the estimated parameters to calculate elasticities and to simulate the effects...

This paper estimates Nash-type fiscal reaction functions for European governments competing for revenue from diesel excises. It appears that European governments strategically set their excise levels by responding to their neighbors' tax rates. This provides evidence for the presence of tax...

Transport has significant externalities including carbon emissions and air pollution. Public health research has identified additional social gains from active travel, due to health benefits of physical exercise. Per mile, these benefits greatly exceed the external costs from car use. We...

This study calculates efficient taxes on gasoline and road use designed to combat driving related externalities when motorists avoid taxes due to an excessive economic driving-style. The efficient tax on gasoline is reduced below the Pigouvian rate due to such avoidance. The current US tax rate...