Electric vehicles (EVs) eliminate tailpipe emissions, but their lower marginal costs may stimulate additional car travel and a shift away from active and public transport. We empirically examine how EV adoption affects travel behavior using detailed trip-level survey data and administrative microdata on household characteristics and passenger car registrations from the Netherlands. To mitigate endogeneity concerns, we employ a quasi-experimental design, comparing the number of trips and distance traveled by EV adopters with those of car users who acquired an EV relatively soon after the survey, i.e., not-yet-adopters. We find that EV adoption increases car kilometers, but the size of the effect varies substantially across space and over time. Car use rises mainly on weekends and among urban households. We find no evidence of reduced cycling, walking, or public transport use, although public transport estimates are imprecise due to low baseline usage. The additional car use by EVs may amplify accident, infrastructure, and congestion costs, underscoring the need for targeted policy action.
Reducing meat consumption has become a global environmental target. We provide novel evidence on how price change in real life affects grocery shopping behavior in the Netherlands. We focus on price-induced behavioral response among major meat categories (beef, pork, and poultry), fish, and the emerging product category of plant-based meat substitutes. Our analysis is based on detailed weekly transaction data from approximately 1,500 products in 884 stores from several retail chains between 2015 and 2018. The own- and cross-price elasticities are estimated using quadric Almost Ideal Demand System models. Results show that beef, poultry and fish have inelastic own-price elasticities, while the demand for pork and meat substitutes are price elastic. The cross-price elasticities indicate that pork is a substitute to meat substitutes, while other types of animal products are complements for meat substitutes. Our findings support that a potential meat tax on beef and pork will be effective in leading to the substitution to plant-based proteins. We further assess the effect of two different meat tax designs in the Netherlands including a uniform tax by increasing the value-added tax for meat and an excise tax that considers the external costs of carbon emissions.
This study uses a food basket-based choice experiment to estimate price elasticities of the demand for beef, pork, chicken, fish, and plant-based meat substitutes (PBMS). The study also experimentally tests if price elasticities remain the same under different tax scenarios, and disentangle the price and non-price effects of meat taxation and its interaction with carbon labeling. We introduce an innovative choice experiment design that allows for choosing multiple products and quantities while providing participants with customized choice cards. We conduct a survey experiment on a representative sample of 2088 Dutch households and analyze the data using Multiple Discrete-Continous Extreme Value (MDCEV) models. We find that a climate meat tax would have a significant effect on reducing the consumption of high-emission meat products such as beef and pork, and a significant but subtle corresponding substitution towards PBMS. Our preliminary findings indicate that meat consumption is price elastic, and so is PBMS. We also find that price elasticities linearly increase in response to larger price changes of meat. Messages on tax framing and revenue redistribution may generate additional backfire of increased pork consumption, but not much effect on other products. Moreover, we find some evidence that carbon labels can reduce beef consumption and increase PBMS consumption, and a combination of taxation and carbon footprint labels has a stronger effect in reducing beef consumption.
with Cecilia Baido, Mark Kattenberg, Joris Klingen, Elena Nixdorf, Konstantin Sommer