Vortrag
Gas, Tax and Cars: How Does Differential Fuel Taxation Impact New Car Purchases?

Helene Naegele, Pauline Givord, Celine Grislain-Letremy

29th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association : EEA 2014
Toulouse, Frankreich, 25.08.2014 - 29.08.2014



Abstract:
This paper sets out to identify the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly registration of new private cars in France from 2003 to 2007. Detailed information on the car holder enables us to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers. We find that sensitivity of short-term demand with respect to fuel prices is generally low. According to these estimates, a policy equalizing diesel and gasoline taxes in France would reduce the share of diesel purchases from 69% to 66% in the short-run, without substantially changing the average fuel consumption or CO2 emission levels of new cars. Still, according to these estimates, introducing a carbon tax (at 15e/ton of CO2) could slightly decrease the CO2 emission levels of new cars (by 0.1%).