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Time-series estimation of gasoline demand elasticities often does not take into account the possibility of non-stationarity in the underlying data, which may render the parameter estimates spurious. Studies have shown that the time trending variables used to explain gasoline demand could be difference stationary and therefore may require cointegration analysis to assess the relationship among the trending variables. In this work we use the cointegration technique to derive long run and short run demand elasticities of non-commercial gasoline consumption using time-series data for the USA from 1949 to 2004. We also attempt to incorporate the presence of a structural break in the data generation process of the time trending variables. Our results show that the consumption of gasoline and lifetime income have a long term stable relationship after the second oil shock of 1978. Prior to the first oil shock of 1973, no such long run relationship could be established through cointegration.

This paper explores a tension between financialisation of electricity infrastructures and efforts to bring critical urban systems into common ownership. Focusing on the emerging landscape of electricity regulation and e-mobility in the United Kingdom (UK), it examines how electricity grid ownership has become financialised, and why the economic assumptions that enabled this financialisation are being called into question. New technologies, such as smart electricity meters and electric vehicles, provide cities with new tools to tackle poor air quality and greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity grids are key enabling infrastructures but the companies that run them do not get rewarded for improving air quality or tackling climate change. UK government regulation of electricity grids both enables financialisation and forecloses opportunities to manage the infrastructure for wider environmental and public benefit. Nonetheless, the addition of smart devices to this network - the 'smart grid' – opens up an opportunity for common ownership of the infrastructure. Transforming the smart grid into commons necessitates deep structural reform to the entire architecture of infrastructure regulation in the UK.