Fuel-economy standards for new vehicles are a primary policy instrument in many countries to reduce the carbon footprint of the transportation sector. These standards have many channels of costs and benefit, impacting sales, composition, vehicle attributes, miles traveled and externalities in...

Fourteen U.S. states recently pledged to adopt limits on greenhouse gases (GHGs) per mile of light-duty automobiles. Previous analyses predicted this action would significantly reduce emissions from new cars in these states, but ignored possible offsetting emissions increases from policy-induced...

This paper explores how the costs of meeting given aggregate targets for pollution emissions change with the imposition of the requirement that key pollution-related industries be compensated for potential losses of profit from the pollution regulation. Using analytically and numerically solved...

Exploiting a rich data set of passenger vehicle registrations in twenty U.S. metropolitan statistical areas from 1997 to 2005, we examine the effects of gasoline prices on the automotive fleet's composition. We find that high gasoline prices affect fleet fuel economy through two channels: (1)...

The efficiency properties of price and non-price instruments for conservation in environmental policy are well understood. Yet, there is little evidence comparing the effectiveness of these instruments, especially when considering water resource management. We exploit a rich panel of residential...

Fuel economy standards change the composition of the vehicle fleet, potentially influencing accident safety. I introduce a model of the fleet that captures risks across interactions between vehicle types while simultaneously recovering estimates of unobserved driving safety behavior. The model...

We estimate the sensitivity of scrap decisions to changes in used car values - the "scrap elasticity" - and show how it influences used car fleets under policies aimed at reducing gasoline use. Large scrap elasticities will tend to produce emissions leakage under efficiency standards as the...

We develop a model of the private provision of public goods in a world where agents face convex costs of provision. Consonant with prior empirical evidence, we introduce preference heterogeneity by allowing a subset of agents to exhibit pro-social behavior that reflects "green" preferences. We...

Pigouvian taxes can fully correct for market failures due to externalities, but actual policies are commonly forced to deviate from the Pigouvian ideal due to administrative or political constraints. This paper derives sufficient statistics, which require a minimum of market information, that...

The firm response to regulation is seldom as controversial as in the context of fuel economy standards, a dominant policy to reduce emissions from vehicles worldwide. It has long been argued that such standards lead to vehicle weight changes that increase accident fatalities. Using unconditional...