It is widely accepted that the costs of under-pricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors –...

We estimate the rebound effect for private transportation using cross-section micro-level data in Switzerland for 2010. Our simultaneous equations model accounts for endogeneity of travel distance, vehicle fuel intensity and vehicle weight. Compared to the literature, our paper provides an...

A large literature base has found that economic factors have important effects on traffic crashes. A small but growing branch of literature also examines the role that gasoline prices play in the occurrence of traffic crashes. However, no studies have investigated the possible difference of...

The United States consumes more petroleum-based liquid fuel per capita than any other OECD high-income country—30 percent more than the second-highest country (Canada) and 40 percent more than the third-highest (Luxembourg). The transportation sector accounts for 70 percent of U.S. oil...

Understanding the sensitivity of gasoline demand to changes in prices and income has important implications for policies related to climate change, optimal taxation and national security, to name only a few. While the short-run price and income elasticities of gasoline demand in the United...

A long line of research investigates whether the retail prices of electricity and natural gas send proper signals about scarcity in order to induce efficient consumption. Historically, regulated utilities have not designed tariffs that set marginal prices equal to marginal costs. Currently, some...

We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for unobserved heterogeneity and censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a large and...

Previous research suggests that the elasticity of light-duty motor vehicle travel with respect to fuel cost, known as the "rebound effect," is modest in size and probably declined in magnitude between the 1960s and the late 1990s. However, turmoil in energy markets during the early 2000s has...

We explore whether non-competitive pricing prevails in Germany’s retail gasoline market by examining the influence of the crude oil price on the retail gasoline price, focusing specifically on how this influence varies according to the brand and to the degree of competition in the vicinity of...

This paper quantitatively evaluates consumers' willingness to pay for hybrid vehicles by estimating the demand of hybrid vehicles in the U.S. market. Using micro-level data on consumer purchases of hybrid and non-hybrid vehicles from National Household Travel Survey 2009, this paper formulates a...