Policy makers are increasingly choosing market-based policies over command and control options. In this dissertation, I explore two instances of policy choices in environmental economics: a relatively novel market-based approach to handle congestion in transportation policy; and, government provision and control in the arena of water policy.The first chapter estimates the traffic volume and travel time effects of the recently implemented road congestion pricing on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. I employ both a difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity approach to analyze previously unexploited data for the two years spanning the price change and obtain causal estimates of the hourly average treatment effects of the policy. I find evidence of peak spreading in traffic volume and significant decreases in travel time during peak hours. I also find suggestive evidence of substitution to a nearby bridge that is not subject to congestion pricing. In addition, I show significant decreases in travel time variability. Using my results, I calculate own- and cross-price elasticities for trips due to the toll change and include back-of-the-envelope calculations for the welfare effects of the policy.The second chapter I explore the impact of government water delivers in California's Central Valley. California's agricultural sector receives large quantities of irrigation water from the federal and state water projects. In recent years, there have been significant restrictions on these deliveries due to droughts and regulation to protect endangered species. This chapter empirically tests the hypothesis that higher deliveries to water districts in a given county lead to higher agricultural employment and cropped area and provides point estimates of this effect and uncertainty around the estimates. The results show robust evidence of a statistically and economically significant impact of irrigation water deliveries on employment and area. This effect is robust to different definitions of employment, alternate control groups, and different windows of data.
This dissertation contains three essays exploring how economic agents and markets respond to weather events and natural disasters.Chapter 1 examines whether short-run weather fluctuations affect the decision to go solar by residential customers in California. The results show that residential customers whose sign-ups are followed by less sunny weather are more likely to cancel their contracts. This behavior is inconsistent with rationality, as a solar PV system is a long-term investment whose return is not affected by short-run weather fluctuations. I analyze this behavior further using a theoretical model of projection bias combined with engineering models of solar power production and energy demand. Chapter 2 studies housing market responses to hurricanes using detailed data on Florida housing markets during 2000-2016. We identify the causal effects of hurricanes in a difference-in-differences framework exploiting the exogeneity of hurricane path and timing. The results show that the housing market is dominated by a negative supply shock lasting up to three years. While these effects are transitory, we show that they are associated with the arrival of home buyers whose income is higher, holding fixed the quality of homes transacted. This implies a lasting shift in the local economic profile towards higher income, along with potential gentrification.Chapter 3 investigates whether and how voters' preferences on environmental policy are reflected in legislative elections. People's belief in climate change is known to be affected by experiencing extreme weather events. We study the electoral responses to these randomly occurring events in House of Representative elections. To focus on the channel of environmental preference, we estimate differential responses based on the environmental ideology of the incumbent congressperson conditional on party membership. We find evidence that climate-related extreme weather events motivate political giving to challengers of anti-environment incumbents, increase the overall competitiveness in these races, and lead to a lower probability of re-election for these incumbents.
Environmental economics passed its age of infancy. It grew rapidly over the last decades and established itself as a discipline based on the powerful economic paradigm and reaching beyond it to capture important economy-environment interactions. The view offered here on the future of environmental economics is based on the premise that economic pressures will tend to put the ecological system under increasing stress and will thus geopardize the sustainable development of both the economic and the ecological system, unless the understanding of the economy-environment interdependence is further improved and all agents in the political decision making process can be convinced to take the necessary political action. The paper does not discuss the major likely, promising and/or necessary substantive topics on the agenda of future research in a systematic way. It chooses, instead, the methods of analysis as the primary organizing principle starting out from theoretical concepts (externality theory) and their ramifications then turning to issues of interdisciplinarity and empirical relevance to finally assess the (future) impact of environmental economics on shaping environmental policy. Real-world environmental problems, the driving forces of research in the field, are also addressed, of course, but under the premise that there is not too much dispute about what the relevant issues are. Attention is drawn on a number of current deficits and proposals for improvement are offered. Given the recent thriving expansion of the field and its increasing impact on practical environmental policy, there is little reason to believe that this positive development will not continue. But if additional efforts are directed towards coping with the current weaknesses identified in the paper environmental economists will certainly be able to do even better than in the past.
This thesis consists of three chapters that investigate environmental policy questions from an empirical point of view. Chapter 1 examines the trustworthiness of official air pollution data sources for Beijing when compared to similar data from the US Embassy in Beijing. Using a statistical regularity, I find that the official data likely suffered from misreporting until the end of 2012. From 2013 onwards, however, misreporting appears to have stopped. Chapter 2 evaluates China's main air pollution control policy to study the effects of environmental regulation when institutions are weak. I find that the policy was ultimately successful in reducing air pollution, but that those effects only set in once the Chinese government started appropriate air pollution monitoring. Moreover, I quantify the efficiency of different policy instruments to control air pollution in China and find that - in contrast to the United States - a market-based solution and a technology mandate for scrubbers are nearly identical. Finally, Chapter 3 studies whether nudges can help consumers align intention and action when choosing their electricity contract. Using a survey experiment, we find that only a default nudge had a statistically and economically significant effect on consumers' decision to contract renewable energy. ; Aquesta tesi consisteix en tres estudis que investiguen problemes relacionats amb la política de medi ambient des d'un punt de vista empíric. El capítol 1 examina fins a quin punt són fiables les dades sobre la contaminació de l'aire a Beijing quan es comparen amb dades semblants de l'ambaixada dels EUA. Mitjançant l'ús d'una regularitat estadística, proporciono evidència que les dades oficials segurament van ser manipulades fins a finals del 2012. A partir del 2013, però, les dades semblen indicar que es va posar fi a aquesta manipulació. El capítol 2 avalua la política xinesa més important duta a terme per frenar la contaminació de l'aire i pretén estudiar els efectes de la regulació del medi ambient en un context ...
This dissertation comprises four essays on the topic of environmental economics and industrial organization. In the first essay, we develop a two-country world differential game model with a polluting firm in each country to investigate the equilibrium of the game between firms when they decide to trade or not and to see under which conditions social welfare coincides with the market equilibrium. In the second essay, we built a model where firms strategically choose whether to participate in an auction/lottery to attain pollution permits, or instead invest in green R&D, to show that, somewhat counterintuitively, a desirable side effect of the auction is in fact that of fostering environmental R&D in an admissible range of the model parameters. The third essay investigates a second-best trade agreement between two countries when pollution spillovers are asymmetric to examine the strategic behavior of governments in using pollution taxes and tariffs under trade liberalization. The fouth essay studies the profitability of exogenous output constraint in a differential game model with price dynamics under the feedback strategies.
My dissertation is comprised of three separate essays in the field of environmental economics. The first chapter experimentally models the climate change social dilemma and evaluates how heterogeneous environmental impacts and unequal endowments affect the propensity to avoid catastrophic climate change. Introducing a punishment mechanism to alleviate the collective bargaining problem, I identify the external factors and intrinsic preferences that impede cooperation. Inequality and delayed contributions negatively affect successful provision, while higher levels of collective-risk increase the probability of threshold attainment. A consensual punishment mechanism incentivizes cooperation in low-risk and heterogeneous groups, overcoming the collective action problem.The second chapter investigates the efficacy of military and legal efforts to thwart environmental domestic terrorism. While passive legislative interventions increase the cost of illegal action and proactive policies thwart terrorism with preemptive strikes, the efficacy of counterterrorism efforts has been questioned. Using quarterly data from 1980 to 2014, I analyze the effect of counterterrorism policy on radical environmental direct action (REDA) modes of attack and the severity of illegal actions. Combining vector autoregression and intervention analysis under a rational choice framework, I find that while legislative policies have decreased the economic severity of attacks, incidents have more than doubled. Proactive interventions reduce domestic terrorism, but by a smaller magnitude than the increase from passive legislation. Substituting between modes of attack and ideological targets, policies have tripled the use of explosives while REDA attacks against people have increased more than sixfold in the long run.In the final chapter, I explore the role of payments for ecosystem services (PES) and their impact on conservation efforts to avoid deforestation in developing nations. Targeting counterfactual-based studies to identify additionality gains and minimize leakage impacts, I perform a meta-analysis to evaluate how PES program design and market factors impact avoided deforestation. Program design variables include contract length, payment differentiation, and participation targeting. Environmental variables proxy for opportunity costs by controlling for alternative land use prices and socioeconomic conditions. As each dimension has a varying impact on avoided deforestation, these results aim to influence future market-based interventions.
The dissertation consists of five chapters in Environmental Economics and Policy. The first three chapters consider (optimal) policy in situations where multiple market failures interact, or there exist restrictions on the type or scope of policy instruments available to the policymaker. The first chapter assesses under what conditions, and what type of, unilateral policy can prevent rising global emission concentrations. The second chapter analyzes second-best optimal environmental policy responses to real and financial shocks when firms are subject to credit constraints. The third chapter explores optimal transitory tax policy when the adjustment to a new consumption bundle is slow due to habit formation and the lack of habit internalization. The last two chapters focus on the size of the environmental externality, and the evaluation of policy effectiveness respectively. The fourth chapter develops a closed-form formula to compute the social cost of carbon (SCC), which explains the parameter-driven SCC variation of a mainstream IAM without systematic bias, and allows for an analytic breakdown and quantification of how different sets of parameters contribute to the SCC distribution. The fifth and final chapter is an empirical assessment of the effect of car registration and road taxes on vehicles average CO2 emissions from new vehicles in the EU15 countries over the period 2001-2010.
Environmental issues have large impacts on both developed and developing economies. In this dissertation, I focus on three environmental issues, assess their impacts, and evaluate the effectiveness of related remedies, using both ex-post evaluation and ex-ante forecasting methods.Using individual travel diary data collected before and after the rail transit coverage expansion in urban Beijing, the first chapter estimates the impact of rail accessibility improvement on the usage of rail transit, automobiles, buses, walking, and bicycling, measured as percent distance traveled by each mode in an individual trip. My results indicate that the average rail transit usage significantly increased, by 98.3% for commuters residing in the zones where the distances to the nearest station decreased because of the expansion, relative to commuters in the zones where the distances did not change. I also find that auto usage significantly decreased, by 19.8%, while the impact on bus usage was small and not statistically significant. Average walking and bicycling distance (combined) increased by 11.8%, indicating that walking and bicycling are complements to urban rail transit, instead of substitutes. Furthermore, I find that estimated changes in auto usage and rail transit usage vary significantly with auto ownership and income.Based on a coauthored paper with Peter Berck and Jintao Xu, the second chapter studies the collective forest tenure reform in China. In this reform, the Chinese government allowed collective village forest land to pass into individualized ownership. The government's purpose was to alleviate rural poverty, stimulate investment in forests, and improve forest conservation. Using data collected from 288 villages, in eight provinces, over three years, this chapter measures the effect of the individualization on one aspect of forest investment, forestation. Because villages voted on the reform, we identify the causal effect of the reform by an instrumental variable estimator based on the countywide decision to offer the reform package. We find an increase in forestation of 7.87% of forest land in the year of the reform, and no significant change in harvesting. It implies that the individualization of the village forestlands is on track to meet the societal goals concerning forest conditions.The third chapter is based on a coauthored paper with Sarah Lewis, Maximilian Auffhammer, and Peter Berck. In this chapter, we study crop coverage adaption to climate change. In the face of warming weather, famers may grow different crops that better fit in the new landscape. This type of adaptation may offset the negative effects of climate change. However, adaptation may be restricted by soil conditions, which determine crop yields and whether the substitution crops could fit in. The feasible amount of adaptation could be small, even in the face of substantial warming. Therefore, the negative effects of climate change can be offset only to a limited extent. In this paper, we pair a 10-year panel of satellite-based crop coverage and soil data with a fine-scale weather data set that incorporates the whole distribution of temperatures within each day and across all days in the 10-year period. Combining a proportion type model with local regressions, we simultaneously address the econometric issues of proportion dependent variables and spatial correlation of unobserved factors. Based on the estimates of crop choices, we predict future crop maps under several climate change scenarios. We find that rice and cotton spread toward the north, corn share increases, and soy share decreases on average. We also find that crop shifting patterns vary across quality levels of soils. There is less crop adaptation on better soils than on soils with lower quality.
[eng] Fighting poverty and protecting the environment are two of the most urgent challenges facing the international community at the start of the 21st century (United Nations, 2015). One aspect that will be crucial in this challenge is aligning environmental, energy and development policy in order to create a triple dividend between the three policy fields. Additionally, integrating environmental protection policies with poverty reduction strategies is by no means a new concept, but as we continue to think about these challenges, it is important to link environmental and economic components together through a type of development that is economically feasible, socially desirable and environmentally benign. Within each of these challenges lies different possible interventions, but space must be created for public policy to be at the center of these challenges in order to generate the best available evidence and guide our decision making. This dissertation consists of three independent chapters that represent responses to these challenges, and provides empirical evidence that can guide specific policy recommendations in the fields of development economics, and environmental and resource economics. Universal access to modern energy services is central to the international sustainable development agenda. According to the International Energy Agency (2010, 2017), 1.4 billion people across the world did not have access to electricity, and 2.7 billion people still rely on traditional use of solid biomass. The international development agenda has placed an emphasis on improving access to electricity as well as made large investments in the energy sector throughout developing countries. It is argued that the universalization of access to electric energy in the world is of fundamental importance for the eradication of poverty and the reduction of social inequality (Kaygusuz, 2011). Despite the large investments made in the energy sector to increase rural electrification and the diffusion of modern cooking systems, ...
{This thesis uses the tools of applied econometrics to study the impact of economic incentives on household welfare and decision-making and the environmental outcome of urban transportation policies in the U.S. and in developing countries.Transportation is an essential component of day-to-day life. An extensive transportation system offers mobility, expanding individuals' access to employment opportunities, agglomeration benefits to firms and employees, reduced trade costs, and an overall increase in productivity. The positive effects of an efficient transportation network in an economy are often accompanied by rising motorization rates. This, in turn, can lead to air pollution, road congestion, and increasing dependence on fossil fuels. In the past few decades, climate change concerns have made policymakers and governments agencies in both developed and developing countries incentivize improvement in fuel economy of vehicles as well as promote alternative fuel vehicles.Alternative fuel vehicles currently arriving in the market offer better driving performance compared to their predecessors, and their market penetration is higher than before. However, most people still do not consider these alternative fuel vehicles as a substitute of traditional gasoline cars. Incentives offered to consumers to promote adoption have achieved varied results. The first chapter of the dissertation studies the stated vehicle transaction decisions of 3,154 survey respondents located in the state of California. While the effectiveness of policy incentives like tax credits and rebates is found to be more universal, the effect of High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane permit or free parking benefit on adoption decision depends on the likelihood of the household being able to use the benefits. In addition, familiarity with an alternative fuel technology is found to be positively correlated with the preference for electric battery or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Prior ownership of a hybrid vehicle made the household more likely to purchase an alternative fuel vehicle in the future. This persistence in choice behavior can be attributed to heterogeneity among vehicle purchasers or considered as a sign of positive experience. Experience can reduce skepticism about alternative fuel vehicles and induce future adoption. Accounting for the number of years of ownership of alternative fuel vehicles, the results show that more experience has a positive effect on the probability of repurchase of the same or a newer technology vehicle. This result contributes towards a long standing debate of whether the incentives work only as a marketing mechanism or does it have any long term benefits. The positive correlation in preference pattern and the willingness to pay measures indicate that even if the price-based incentives work as a marketing mechanism they play an important role in initiating potential state dependence in purchase behavior to improve adoption in the long run. In recent years, emerging economies like India and China have been experiencing the externalities related to increased motorization. Urbanization accompanied with increasing per capita income has led to a rise in private automobile demand. Historically, the infrastructure of major metropolitans in these emerging economies was not designed to support a sudden rise in the use of automobiles. As a result, a majority of these metropolitans suffer from congestion and pollution from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The local government and policymakers in these economies are considering a variety of policies like to scrap old polluting vehicles, impose fuel standards, cordon tolls, and driving restrictions to address these issues. Driving restrictions has been implemented in several metropolitan cities in emerging economies like Beijing, China, Santiago, Chile, Mexico City, Mexico, S\~{a}o Paulo, Brazil, Bogot\'{a}, Colombia, and recently New Delhi, India. According to this policy, cars with license plate numbers ending with certain digits are allowed to be driven on separate days of the week. A number of studies have shown that though the license plate based policy is effective in the short run in reducing local pollutants as well as GHG emissions, it is not effective in the medium or long run. In spite of these results, it is considered more equitable compared to price-based policies like congestion tax or a cordon toll that may impose a greater financial burden on the low-income commuters. At present, there is a limited number of studies that consider the distributional effect of the policy. The second chapter on license-plate-based driving restriction policy considers the distributional effect of the policy in comparison to a cordon toll and a vehicle mile tax by analyzing the mode choice of commuters in Santiago, Chile. Analysis of different policy scenarios suggests that though the restriction has a negative distributional effect on all commuters, in the absence of a revenue recycle mechanism the effect is less adverse in comparison to a vehicle mile tax or a cordon toll for the same level of reduction in total car trips.Transportation and the power sector are the leading sources of GHG emissions in the U.S. Policies and programs trying to reduce GHG emissions from the power sector like the federal Clean Power Plan, rebates and tax credits for the adoption of rooftop photovoltaic cells, and the renewable portfolio standard incentivizes investment in renewable energy resources. The programs have increased the share of renewable resources in the grid but, utilities are finding it hard to integrate these intermittent sources of energy into the regular dispatch module. In the transportation sector, the policy focus has mostly been on encouraging adoption of electric vehicles (EV). The latter has zero tailpipe emissions but has to be connected to the grid to operate the vehicle. Electricity pricing will play a major role in dealing with this quandary. The third chapter on electricity pricing and EV charging behavior considers the environmental impact of shifting from tiered or block pricing structure to a time-of-use rate structure that matches consumption with the time-varying cost of electricity production. The results provide evidence supporting the decision to change the pricing structure as marginal emissions of carbon dioxide is lower under the time-of-use rate structure compared to the tiered pricing plan. Moreover, the analysis of emissions in each time-of-use period brings forth the importance of defining the periods such that utilities and environmentalists can maximize the benefits of EV adoption and the increasing share of renewable energy resources in the power sector.
In this dissertation, I contribute to three strands of the environmental economics literature: (1) regulation of air pollution from stationary sources, (2) interaction between behavioral biases and consumer demand for energy, and (3) long-term distributional outcomes of policies that seek to mitigate climate damages from the housing sector. The first paper looks at how environmental regulations work in practice -- assessing ex-post the causal consequences of a specific policy, the Large Combustion Plant Directive. The Large Combustion Plant Directive was a key policy instrument to limit air pollution from power stations in the European Union. The Directive set limits on emissions of harmful sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particle dust from combustion plants with total capacity of at least 50 MWth. A fundamental empirical problem is to create a valid counterfactual, to understand what would have happened in the absence of such a regulation. As is the case with most command and control policies, all plants fell under regulation, but the stringency was vintage-differentiated. More crucially, a group of plants chose to opt-out of emissions performance standards but were instead required to gradually cease operations. I exploit the structure of the directive to construct valid control groups to assess the effectiveness of emission performance standards. Evidence from this empirical study suggests that EU-wide emission performance standards, when sufficiently stringent, are an effective instrument for pollution abatement at the plant stack-level. However, the regulation was not ambitious enough and in fact allowed business-as-usual operations for some of the most carbon-intensive power plants operating in the European Union. In the second paper, I exploit a large-scale natural experiment in utility billing cycles at the building level to identify the salience effect of costs on energy consumption. By exploiting variation in billing cycles, I find new evidence for consumer inattention to energy costs: consumers ...
Energy production is associated with a number of significant environmental externalities. For instance, coal-fired power plants emit both local pollutants (such as particulate matter and sulphur dioxide) and the global pollutant carbon dioxide. This creates a need for government intervention: left to their own devices, energy producers will do more environmental damage than is socially optimal. The choices faced by policy-makers in regulating the energy industry are, however, rarely clear. Government regulators must trade off the externalities caused by different types of energy production. While nuclear power generation does not emit carbon dioxide, there is the risk of significant environmental damage in the event of a nuclear meltdown. While many proponents of biofuels hoped that replacing fossil fuels with biofuels would decrease carbon dioxide emissions, land-use changes associated with biofuels production can cause environmental damage. These trade-offs motivate the chapters of this dissertation.In the first chapter, I study changes to nuclear power safety following major regulatory changes in electricity markets. Following electricity market restructuring, approximately half of all commercial U.S. nuclear power reactors were sold by price-regulated public utilities to independent power producers. At the time of the sales, some policy-makers raised concerns that these corporations would ignore safety. Others claimed that the sales would bring improved reactor management, with positive effects on safety. Using data on various safety measures and a difference-in-difference estimation strategy, I find that safety improved following ownership transfers and the removal of price regulations. Generation increased, and this does not appear to have come at the cost of public safety. This paper contributes to several strands of the energy literature. First, it fits in with the literature on electricity deregulation. While this literature has considered a broad set of outcomes, my paper is the first to look closely at safety, an outcome of particular interest for nuclear energy. In line with that, it also contributes to the literature on nuclear safety, which has been of particular interest given accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Finally, my work is germane to the literature on the consequences of deregulation for outcomes beyond private efficiency gains. While there is now some consensus that deregulation can lead to the alignment of private costs and thus to efficiency gains, less is known about the effect on external costs. Papers in this literature are necessarily industry-specific: the interaction of private cost reductions with changes to quality or changes to external costs is highly context-dependent. However, this paper provides intuition for the mechanisms at work, some of which are generalizable beyond the nuclear power industry.In the second and third chapters, I study land-use changes relating to biofuels production. Transportation in the U.S. accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Motor gasoline, excluding ethanol, accounts for around 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, or over 1 billion metric tons each year. Biofuels have been promoted as an alternative to petroleum products that bypasses some of the fundamental problems with the oil market: supporters claim that it is renewable (whereas conventional oil is exhaustible), produced in the U.S. (as opposed to regimes in some cases unfriendly to the U.S.), and carbon-friendly. As the acreage devoted to biofuels crop production expands, however, it can compete with cropland used for food or with natural ecosystems.In the second chapter, joint with Maximilian Auffhammer and Peter Berck, I examine price impacts of biofuels production. The last ten years have seen tremendous expansion in biofuels production, particularly in corn ethanol in the United States, at the same time that commodity prices (e.g., corn) have experienced significant spikes. While supporters claim that biofuels are renewable and carbon-friendly, concerns have been raised about their impacts on land use and food prices. This paper analyzes how U.S. crop prices have responded to shocks in acreage supply; these shocks can be thought of as a shock to the residual supply of corn for food. Using a structural vector auto-regression framework, we examine shocks to a crop's own acreage and to total cropland. This allows us to estimate the effect of dedicating cropland or non-crop farmlands to biofuels feedstock production. A negative shock in own acreage leads to an increase in price for soybeans and corn. Our calculations show that increased corn ethanol production during the boom production year 2006/2007 explains approximately 27 percent of the experienced corn price rise. In the final chapter, I study land-use change in Brazil arising from biofuels production. Scientists and economists are increasingly worried that biofuels production is leading to deforestation, and hence loss of habitats and increased carbon dioxide emissions. I estimate land use changes in response to shocks in sugarcane (a biofuels feedstock) and soybean (thought to be affected by United States corn ethanol production) prices in Brazil at a national and regional level. Using county-level data from 1973 to 2005, I consider a dynamic panel data model of input demand for land, conditioning on price changes of other commodities. Unlike the existing literature, I apply a dynamic panel data estimator that is unbiased (unlike OLS with fixed effects) and more precise than GMM. The short-run price elasticity of sugarcane acreage in Brazil is estimated to be approximately zero, whereas the elasticity of soybean acreage is 0.9 when both spot and futures prices change. The regional estimates for soybeans show considerable variation, and are highest in areas of ecological importance, such as the cerrado. Sugarcane estimates are more homogeneous. These results should be taken into account in impact assessments of biofuels.
Diffusion du document : OCDE 2 rue André Pascal 75775 Paris Cedex 16 (FRA) ; Le choix de taxation des intrants polluants est remis en cause par un certain nombre d'auteurs sur la base d'estimations de leur élasticité-prix très faible. Ces résultats obtenus à partir de modèles d'optimisation font l'objet d'un premier point où la démarche et les résultats sont présentés. Dans un deuxième point, on discute de la portée de ces estimations en montrant comment il convient de les analyser. Enfin, le troisième point développe les effets d'une taxation de l'azote sur la branche céréalière française à la lumière d'un certain nombre de travaux conduits à l'Unité INRA-ESR de Rennes.
Le choix de taxation des intrants polluants est remis en cause par un certain nombre d'auteurs sur la base d'estimations de leur élasticité-prix très faible. Ces résultats obtenus à partir de modèles d'optimisation font l'objet d'un premier point où la démarche et les résultats sont présentés. Dans un deuxième point, on discute de la portée de ces estimations en montrant comment il convient de les analyser. Enfin, le troisième point développe les effets d'une taxation de l'azote sur la branche céréalière française à la lumière d'un certain nombre de travaux conduits à l'Unité INRA-ESR de Rennes.
This dissertation studies both theoretically and empirically how the allocation of subsidiesmight matter for economic outcomes in a two-sided market framework.The first chapter establishes a non-neutrality result with respect to subsidy allocation in the price theory of two-sided markets with membership externalities building on the works of Rochet and Tirole (2006) and Armstrong (2006). There are many examples of two-sided (or more generally, multi-sided) markets in which two (or more) groups of agents interact via intermediaries or "platforms." The distinguishing feature of these markets is the presence of cross-group externalities: the benefit enjoyed by a member on one side depends on the number of members on the other side of the market. Examples of two-sided markets include: video game platforms, news media, credit cards, and electric vehicles. A basic feature of two-sided markets established by Rochet and Tirole (2006) is the non-neutrality of price structure, that is, how usage fees or membership prices are allocated between the two sides of the market have an impact on economic outcomes like buyer demand.In this work, I consider whether this non-neutrality in the price allocation carries over to the case of subsidies (or taxes) in two-sided markets. Specifically, I develop a stylistic two-sided market model to show that subsidies to the different sides of the market are non-neutral, in the sense that one dollar spent on subsidies given to one side of the market has a different economic impact as the same amount spent on subsidies given to end-users on the other side of the market. This result is driven by a key feature of two-sided markets: the positive network externalities between the two sides of the market. The non-neutrality of the allocation of subsidies has important implications for such quickly growing industries like the electric vehicle market in which currently most governments are subsidizing both sides of the market. Therefore, if we really want to learn where to give subsidies to achieve the policy goal of increased electric vehicle sales the findings of this chapter show that we need to empirically estimate the impact of price subsidies to buyers versus direct subsidies to charging stations using a two-sided market framework.The second chapter, building on the non-neutrality result of the first chapter, provides an empirical analysis of the impact of electric vehicle incentives on electric vehicle adoption that highlights the importance of accounting for the network externalities present in this market. I model the electric vehicle sector as a two-sided market with network externalities to determine which side of the market is more efficient to subsidize depending on key vehicle demand and charging station supply primitives. I use new, large-scale vehicle registry data from Norway to empirically estimate the impact that different subsidies have on electric vehicle adoption when network externalities are present. I present descriptive evidence to show that electric vehicle purchases are positively related to both consumer price and charging station subsidies. I then estimate a structural model of consumer vehicle choice and charging station entry, which incorporates flexible substitution patterns and allows me to analyze out-of-sample predictions of electric vehicle sales.In particular, the counterfactuals compare the impact of direct purchasing price subsidies to the impact of charging station subsidies. I find that between 2010 and 2015 every 100 million Norwegian kroner (around 12.39 million USD) spent on station subsidies alone resulted in 835 additional electric vehicle purchases compared to a counterfactual in which there are no subsidies on either side of the market. The same amount spent on price subsidies led to only an additional 387 electric vehicles being sold compared to a simulated scenario where there were no electric vehicle incentives. However, the relation inverts with increased spending, as the impact of station subsidies on electric vehicle purchases tapers off faster.