EV Markets, Subsidies & Charging
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 3, 2027 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM (EST)
- Chair: Shaun McRae, ITAM
Technology Complementarities and Subsidy Policy: Evidence from Electric Vehicle and Solar Panel Adoption
Abstract
Government policies target air pollution and climate change by incentivizing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and/or residential solar panels (PVs). Knowledge of whether these goods are complements or substitutes can be used to design policies that target environmentalexternalities more efficiently. I use California household-level data to estimate a structural multi-product demand model. I find that consumers view PVs and EVs as complements, with the degree of complementarity varying with vehicle size and income. Counterfactual experiments reveal that complementarity significantly increases bundled EV-PV purchases. This complementarity can be leveraged to design policies that achieve emission targets at lower cost.
Beyond Range Anxiety: Revealed User Preferences in UK EV Public Charging Infrastructure from Large-Scale NLP Analysis
Abstract
Understanding consumer preferences for public electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is essential for guiding infrastructure investment and policy design. Existing research relies predominantly on stated preference surveys, which are costly to administer,limited in geographic scope, and prone to hypothetical and social desirability biases that may systematically misrepresent real-world user priorities. This paper adopts a revealed preference approach, analyzing a large corpus of unsolicited user reviews of public EV charging stations across all UK Local Authority Districts using a fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) language model. Reviews are classified into seven categories: Location, Service Time, Functionality, Availability, Cost, Range Anxiety, and General. This enables the first national-scale, geographydis aggregated consumer intelligence profile of UK EV charging infrastructure. Our results show that Location, Service Time, and Functionality are the dominant concerns among EV charging station users, while Range Anxiety which is consistently emphasized in the survey-based literature as a primary barrier to EV adoption emerges as a comparatively minor standalone category. We argue that Range Anxiety does not disappear but instead manifests latently across Functionality, Availability, and Service Time complaints, pointing to a systematic overstatement of its prominence in prior work driven by the limitations of stated preference methods. Results are further disaggregated across five major UK metropolitan areas, revealing meaningful geographic variation in user priorities. Our findings carry direct implications for EV charging infrastructure regulation, investment prioritization, and the design of minimum quality standards, including the UK's Public Charge Point Regulations 2023.
Anticipation Effects in Vehicle Markets: Evidence from Sweden’s Feebate Policy
Abstract
We study anticipatory behavior by firms and households in vehicle markets. Using administrative data from Sweden on vehicle registrations linked to individual and firm characteristics, we document that the early announcement of Sweden's 2018 feebate policy caused anticipatory vehicle adoption. To avoid the forthcoming higher road taxes, households and firms systematically brought forward the adoption of more emissions-intensive vehicles, resulting in a dirtier vehicle fleet ahead of implementation. Anticipatory adoption is most pronounced among those for whom acting early is easiest or adapting to the policy is most costly. In particular, we provide novel evidence of a dealer loophole that facilitated policy avoidance and show that dealers' early vehicle registration is responsible for half of all anticipatory purchases. Additionally, household and firm liquidity, and information salience amplify anticipatory purchases, while access to charging infrastructure mitigates them by lowering the cost of switching to cleaner vehicles. We develop an empirical framework to quantify the environmental implications of anticipatory behavior that includes the higher emissions intensity of pre-implementation purchases as well as the benefits from the accelerated fleet turnover and estimate environmental costs of approximately $28.42 million --- around 21 percent of the policy's 2019 budget and 19 percent of lifetime environmental benefits from rebate-eligible cars adopted in 2019.Grid Reliability and Technology Substitution in Electric Vehicle Markets
Abstract
Electric utilities implement Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) during periods of elevated wildfire risk. These intentional blackouts, which can last from hours to weeks, may reshape how affected customers perceive the reliability of their electric grid. Building on survey-based evidence linking range anxiety and PSPS exposure to reduced EV purchase intent, we provide the first causal estimates of how PSPS events affect EV sales. Using quasi-random variation in PSPS exposure across California zip codes, we compare battery electric vehicle (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) sales before and after PSPS events using a stacked difference-in-differences design. To address systematic differences between treated and untreated areas in demographics, built environment, and infrastructure quality, we restrict our control group to zip codes have not yet experienced a PSPS event at the time of treatment. We find that PSPS events reduce BEV sales by 7.6% while increasing PHEV sales by 8.0%, consistent with a substitution mechanism driven by range anxiety: when grid reliability is uncertain, consumers favor vehicles that retain a gasoline backup. This substitution partially offsets the social costs of PSPS-induced barriers to EV adoption. Our findings have direct implications for utility regulators and clean transportation policy, as wildfire-driven grid interventions may slow the EV transition in high-risk regions.Discussant(s)
Maria Garcia-Osipenko
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Jianwei Ai
,
Cornell University
Stephanie Weber
,
University of Colorado-Boulder
John Kim
,
Georgia Institute of Technology
Sahba Hafezi
,
California Public Utilities Commission
JEL Classifications
- Q5 - Environmental Economics
- R4 - Transportation Economics