Associate Professor

Director

Subsidizing Mass Adoption of Electric Vehicles

Little is known about demand for EVs in the mass market. Erich Muehlegger and I analyze a natural experiment from California to examine how sensitive low- and middle-income households are to the price of EVs. Using these results, we then calculate the expected subsidy bill required for California to reach its goal of 1.5 million EVs by 2025. Our estimates place the total bill at upwards of $9-$14 billion, a figure that includes both California subsidies as well as any federal subsidies that may exist going forward.

Attribute Substitution in Household Vehicle Portfolios 

The idea that products can act as complements or substitutes is commonplace in economics. What is less well understood is how households trade off attributes of one product with the attributes of another. In this work, Jim Archsmith, Ken Gillingham, Chris Knittel and I find strong evidence of attribute substitution in the household vehicle portfolio. Our findings suggest that attribute substitution may erode a substantial portion of the expected future gasoline savings from fuel economy standards, particularly when attribute-based.