Person:

Muehlegger, Erich J.

Gasoline taxes can be employed to correct externalities associated with automobile use, to reduce dependency on foreign oil, and to raise government revenue. Our understanding of the optimal gasoline tax and the efficacy of existing taxes is largely based on empirical analysis of consumer responses to gasoline price changes. In this paper, we directly examine how gasoline taxes affect consumer behavior as distinct from tax-exclusive gasoline prices. Our analysis shows that a 5-cent tax increase reduces gasoline consumption by 1.3 percent in the short-run, much larger than that from a 5-cent increase in the tax-exclusive gasoline price. This difference suggests that traditional analysis could significantly underestimate policy impacts of tax changes. We further investigate the differential effect from gasoline taxes and tax-exclusive gasoline prices on both the intensive and extensive margins of gasoline consumption. We discuss implications of our findings for the estimation of the implicit discount rate for vehicle purchases and for the fiscal benefits of raising taxes.

We use a rich dataset of weekly cigarette sales to examine how consumers adapt their behavior before and after excise tax increases - whether by reducing demand, stockpiling, traveling to low-tax jurisdictions, or substituting towards lower-cost brands. Consumer response varies substantially for different types of cigarettes. Stockpiling primarily occurs for discount cigarettes and is most pronounced at stores far from lower-tax jurisdictions. Border-crossing is greatest at stores close to low-tax jurisdictions and occurs primarily for cigarettes sold by the carton. Finally, we find modest short-run substitution towards lower-cost brands following a tax-increase, consistent with consumers smoothing the transition to higher cigarette taxes. These differences in consumer behavior lead to meaningful differences in tax incidence - pass-through is higher for discount cigarettes which have more inelastic demand. Pass-through is lower near low-tax borders, especially for cigarettes sold by the carton for which cross-border evasion is greatest.

In this paper, we provide new evidence regarding the pass-through of diesel and gasoline taxes to prices, and how the estimated pass-through depends on a variety of supply conditions including a measure of state residual supply elasticity, and refinery and inventory constraints. In addition, we estimate the response of tax incidence to gasoline content regulations, which complicate the supply chain by increasing product heterogeneity. We find that state gasoline and diesel taxes are on average fully passed on to consumers. We also find that the pass-through of diesel taxes is greater in settings where untaxed uses of diesel are more important, which corresponds to times when residual supply is more elastic. We find that only half of the state diesel tax is passed on to consumers when U.S. refinery capacity utilization is above 95 percent. Gasoline taxes, on the other hand, are fully passed through regardless of season or capacity utilization, indicating that a gas tax holiday would provide price relief to consumers. We find that regional gasoline content regulations affect pass-through – we estimate tax pass-through is 22 percentage points lower in a state using two blends of gasoline than a state using one blend of gasoline.

We study the diffusion of hybrid vehicles among consumers. Using data on sales of 11 different models over seven years, we identify the effect of the penetration rate – total cumulative hybrid sales per capita – on new hybrid purchases. The penetration rate significantly affects new purchases, and the effect differs by hybrid model. In particular, we find a positive diffusion effect from the Toyota Prius and a negative diffusion effect from the Honda Insight, with elasticities of 0.23 to 0.85 for the Prius and –0.08 to –0.32 for the Insight. This finding is consistent with our model of model–specific learning along with anecdotal evidence that early Insight models were perceived to be of lower quality than Prius models. Higher Insight penetration rates gave a negative signal about hybrid quality and inhibited rather than promoted hybrid adoption. The findings are relevant for policy designed to promote new technologies.