Erich Muehlegger’s research while affiliated with University of California, Davis and other places

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Publications (50)


Energy Prices and Electric Vehicle Adoption
  • Article

January 2022

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58 Reads

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25 Citations

SSRN Electronic Journal

James Bushnell

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Erich Muehlegger

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Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Microgeographic Evidence from Chicago

October 2021

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71 Reads

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109 Citations

American Economic Journal Applied Economics

A growing literature documents that air pollution adversely impacts health, productivity, and cognition. This paper provides the first evidence of a causal link between air pollution and aggressive behavior, as documented by violent crime. Using the geolocation of crimes in Chicago from 2001–2012, we compare crime upwind and downwind of major highways on days when wind blows orthogonally to the road. Consistent with research linking pollution to aggression, we find that air pollution increases violent crime on the downwind sides of interstates. Our results suggest that pollution may reduce welfare and affect behavior through a wider set of channels than previously considered. (JEL K42, Q53)


Pass-Through of Own and Rival Cost Shocks: Evidence from the U.S. Fracking Boom

May 2021

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7 Reads

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21 Citations

Review of Economics and Statistics

In imperfectly competitive settings, a firm's price depends on its own costs as well as those of its competitors. We demonstrate that this has important implications for the estimation and interpretation of pass-through. Leveraging a large input cost shock resulting from the fracking boom, we isolate price responses to firm-specific, regional and industry-wide input cost shocks in the US oil refining industry. The pass-through of these components vary from near zero to full pass-through, reconciling seemingly disparate results from the literature. We illustrate the policy implications of rival cost pass-through in the context of a tax on refinery carbon emissions.





Who Bears the Economic Burdens of Environmental Regulations?

February 2019

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89 Reads

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67 Citations

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

A well-developed literature in public economics studies tax incidence-the ultimate distributional impacts of taxes. We draw on this literature to examine not only the distributional effects of environmental taxes or subsidies, but also the likely incidence of nontax regulations such as energy efficiency standards or other environmental mandates. We describe how the distributional effects of environmental policies can be altered by various market conditions, including limited factor mobility, trade exposure, evasion, corruption, or imperfect competition. Finally, we apply these lessons to study carbon policy around the world, as we examine the potential distributional consequences of a worldwide carbon tax on countries with different carbon intensities and different levels of per capita income. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]


Tax compliance and fiscal externalities: Evidence from U.S. diesel taxation

April 2018

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13 Reads

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12 Citations

Journal of Public Economics

Fiscal externalities across jurisdictions can arise from tax evasion and avoidance. While the tax competition literature has generally focused on base shifting and the resulting positive fiscal externalities, we show theoretically and empirically that negative fiscal externalities can dominate when the tax base is apportioned across jurisdictions. This can lead to a negative relationship between jurisdiction size and the desired tax rate. Interstate truckers in the United States owe state diesel taxes based on diesel consumption, which is apportioned based on the miles driven in each state. We find that own-state diesel sales fall when the diesel tax rates of other states rise, suggesting that tax base evasion is the predominant source of externalities. We then estimate a tax reaction specification, finding that the own-state tax rate is negatively correlated with the tax rates set in other states and with state size, both consistent with the sign of the estimated fiscal externality.



Does Tax-Collection Invariance Hold? Evasion and the Pass-Through of State Diesel Taxes †

May 2016

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51 Reads

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71 Citations

American Economic Journal Economic Policy

In simple models, the incidence of a tax is independent of the identity of the remitting party. We illustrate that this prediction fails to hold if opportunities for evasion differ across economic agents. Second, we estimate how the incidence of state diesel taxes varies with the point of collection, where the remitting party varies across states and over time. Moving tax collection upstream from retailers substantially raises the pass-through of diesel taxes to consumers. Furthermore, tax revenues increase when collecting taxes from wholesalers rather than from retailers, suggesting that evasion is the likely explanation for the incidence result.


Citations (36)


... Traditional demand response (DR) approaches primarily depend on inflexible, predetermined load-shifting strategies designed for large industrial or commercial users, often managed through centralized control by energy providers [2]. However, there is a mismatch between the dynamic, real-time characteristics of EV charging demands and the static, rigid framework of traditional DR approaches, underscoring the need for more intelligent, adaptive, and real-time DR strategies [3][4][5] to ...

Reference:

Artificial Intelligence-Driven Optimal Charging Strategy for Electric Vehicles and Impacts on Electric Power Grid
The Economics of Electric Vehicles
  • Citing Article
  • July 2023

Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

... Mainly driven by its environmental benefits, government policies worldwide have widely supported the adoption of EVs by initiating tax credits and distributing subsidies. Some transportation equity discourses argue that their incentive policies provide fewer benefits to low-income households (Liu et al. 2022); however, generally, incentive programs do increase the sales of EVs (Jenn et al. 2018;Muehlegger and Rapson 2022). With ongoing promotions, the EV market is expected to grow more rapidly in the coming years. ...

Subsidizing low- and middle-income adoption of electric vehicles: Quasi-experimental evidence from California
  • Citing Article
  • December 2022

Journal of Public Economics

... High initial costs prevent many potential EV users from taking the plunge even though they will eventually save money in the long term. Research indicates that government subsidies including purchase incentives combined with tax breaks and free financing promote substantial EV market growth (Muehlegger and Rapson, 2023). The rapid growth of EV market penetration in Norway as well as China and the Netherlands stems from their robust incentive programs while regions that lack subsidies show slower adoption. ...

Correcting Estimates of Electric Vehicle Emissions Abatement: Implications for Climate Policy
  • Citing Article
  • July 2022

Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

... Sustainability 2025, 17, 3282 2 of 20 profitability of electric taxis considering electricity prices [14][15][16][17]. The impacts of energy prices on personal/shared electric vehicle operation have also been analyzed in several studies [18][19][20][21][22]. The influence of these factors on operating costs is not visible through standard fuel economy ratings. ...

Energy Prices and Electric Vehicle Adoption
  • Citing Article
  • January 2022

SSRN Electronic Journal

... EVs comprise 18% of all car sales now, up from 14% in 2022 and 2% in 2018, indicating rapid global adoption [4]. This rapid adoption has intensified competition in the automotive industry, leading to a significant rise in product commoditization and a growing emphasis on service quality as a key differentiation [5][6][7][8][9]. Modern consumers, particularly the younger generation, place a greater emphasis on environmental sustainability, intelligence, and personalized experiences [10]. ...

Future Paths of Electric Vehicle Adoption in the United States: Predictable Determinants, Obstacles, and Opportunities
  • Citing Article
  • January 2022

Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy

... Consumer cost savings from EVs vary, with some households experiencing net benefits from choosing EVs over ICEVs, even after accounting for EV subsidies [8]. However, the economic benefits of EVs extend beyond consumer savings, encompassing external costs and benefits such as reduced oil demand, which is projected to peak around 2025 with the use of EVs displacing more than 5 million barrels/day by 2030 [9]. Crafting an optimal policy framework for Electric Vehicle (EV) adoption necessitates the promotion of regional diversity in policies, the pursuit of a dynamic policy trajectory reflective of evolving marginal benefits, and the rationalization of electricity and gasoline prices to encompass their respective social marginal costs [9]. ...

The Economics of Electric Vehicles
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Compared to a more unequal distribution of income (Y A , Y B ), with a mean WTP (WTP), a more equal distribution of income (Y′ A , Y′ B ) increases mean WTP ( ′ WTP ) for the same mean income ( ′ WTP = WTP − WTP > Δ 0), if the constant income elasticity of WTP is below unity. (Fullerton and Muehlegger, 2017). This means that these policies put a disproportionate burden on poorer households (Bento, 2013;Fullerton, 2011). ...

Who Bears the Economic Costs of Environmental Regulations?
  • Citing Article
  • January 2017

SSRN Electronic Journal

... (3) Infrastructure characteristics, including sluggish and rapid-charge networks, commercial and charging public infrastructures, and home-recharging infrastructures [56]; (4) Financial, nonfinancial, and social attributes: free parking spots, price reduction, government subsidy policies, health policies and safety policies [57], tax-discount policies, and penalty policies for petrol-fueled vehicles [58]; (5) Brand attributes: design, brand reputation, and credibility [59]. ...

Future Paths of Electric Vehicle Adoption in the United States: Predictable Determinants, Obstacles and Opportunities
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Its staggered implementation across states creates a natural experiment and enables a clear distinction between treated and control firms, supporting casual inference. Despite its conclusion in 2008, recent studies continue to use NBP data to examine regulatory effects on corporate financial policies (Dang et al., 2023(Dang et al., , 2024, and broader socioeconomic outcomes (Herrnstadt et al., 2021). By exploring how firms adjust their financial reporting in response to regulatory shocks, this study contributes to both the emerging literature on financial impacts of climate policy compliance and the well-established literature on earnings management. ...

Air Pollution and Criminal Activity: Microgeographic Evidence from Chicago
  • Citing Article
  • October 2021

American Economic Journal Applied Economics

... In addition to the timing-based criteria, we require incident-specific clean control stores to be located between 30 to 50 miles from the respective victimized store (which we refer to as unaffected local markets). These conditions ensure a sizeable control group that is comparable to our treatment group while at the same time minimizing confounding effects from spillovers to nearby stores (Muehlegger and Sweeney, 2022). 4 Our paper is one of the first to extend the stacked DiD framework to spatial criteria, contributing to the advancing literature on this methodology (Cengiz et al., 2019;Deshpande and Li, 2019;Butters et al., 2022;Wing et al., 2024). ...

Pass-Through of Own and Rival Cost Shocks: Evidence from the U.S. Fracking Boom
  • Citing Article
  • May 2021

Review of Economics and Statistics