Conference Agenda

We analyze how spatial characteristics, socio-economic factors, travel patterns, and gasoline prices have influenced the adoption dynamics of Electric Vehicles (EVs) across 410 regions in Quebec, Canada, from 2012 to 2018. The average exponential growth rate was 66% with a range of 33% to 86% across different regions. We find that higher population density and a greater prevalence of individual houses experienced greater growth of EVs. Additionally, a higher proportion of self-employed workers, a larger number of children, and a higher median income are also associated with increased EVs adoption rates. Conversely, larger household sizes are linked to a decrease in EVs adoption rates. In terms of travel patterns, regions with a higher proportion of households with a home-to-work commute exceeding 45 minutes show a positive correlation with EVs adoption. Our analysis reveals that spatial factors account for 38% of the variation in adoption trends across regions, socio-demographic factors explain another 38% and travel patterns 24%. Furthermore, we observe a significant impact of gasoline prices, with an elasticity of 2.9. However, further analysis is needed to fully understand this relationship.

The use of private cars constitutes the biggest part of CO2 emissions related to road transportation. Herein I use a structural model and a novel dataset of the new and used-car market to estimate the determinants of private car demand and its responsiveness to price variation. This is important to understand the impact of subsidies on low-emitting cars (or taxes on polluting cars) as it determines the greening of the car fleet and consequently emission mitigation. Results show that demand responsiveness to price variations is about four times higher when considering used-car market data. This is good news since emission-oriented policies will have an impact that is stronger than expected. This also advocates for emission-related subsidies and taxes in the used-car market, which has been recently put in place in France.

Passenger transport plays a crucial role in achieving climate-neutrality. While a switch to zero-emission vehicles is a crucial part in this process, policy makers likely have to resort to a differentiated mix of complementary policy measures to achieve global targets on climate-neutrality. To help policy makers design effective measures, we analyse the effect of environmental policies on CO2 emissions from passenger cars in Austria from 1965-2019. In a first step, we propose a novel environmental policy stringency index tailored to the Austrian transport sector for the period 1950-2019. In a second step, we analyse the effect of different policies on transport-related CO2 emissions in a structural vector autoregressive model. This allows us to control for possible interdependencies between the policies and remaining variables. We find that policies targeting the investment decision to buy new cars reduced emissions in Austria more significantly than policies targeting the usage of cars. The engine-related insurance tax quantitatively shows the strongest impact on emissions, while the standard fuel consumption tax shows the highest statistical significance.

To accelerate the electrification of passenger vehicles in the United States, the federal government recently expanded subsidies for investing in new public charging stations prioritizing their construction in low-income and rural areas and favoring level 3 over level 2 charging stations. Given these policy priorities, we use a novel research design and data to estimate the effects of public charging infrastructure on plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) adoption, addressing two main questions: First, will subsidizing level-3 chargers be more effective at increasing PEV adoption than level-2 chargers? Second, how do low-income and rural vehicle buyers respond to public charging? Results show a stronger PEV demand response to level 3 chargers, remaining significant even when located at greater distances. Public chargers notably influence higher-income households, urban, and suburban residents, highlighting disparities in PEV demand.