I am an applied microeconomist and my main fields of research are public economics and energy economics. I study how how consumers and firms respond to government interventions, with a particular focus on the energy sector.
Email: costanza.cincotta@cunef.edu
CV: [Download PDF]
Local charger availability and Electric Vehicle adoption: Evidence from Norway, with Øyvind Thomassen [Link], Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM).
This paper examines the effect of local public charging infrastructure on electric vehicle (EV) adoption using microdata from Norway between 2010 and 2023. We use 1.59 million new car registrations, geocoded to buyers' residences and matched to nearby charging stations, along with neighbourhood controls and fixed effects, to estimate the causal impact of local charger availability. Our preferred estimates show that adding 100 normal chargers within 5 km of a new car buyer’s residence increases the probability of EV adoption by 0.6 percentage points, while 100 fast chargers raise it by 3 percentage points.
Competitive Externalities of U.S. Government Economic Development Subsidies, with Allison Koester and Elisa Casi-Eberhard
[Link]
We study the competitive effects of US government subsidies to corporations. Subsidies reduce the costs that subsidized firms incur when implementing their competitive strategies, which can lead to negative externalities for non-subsidized firms. Using a novel dataset that tracks US federal, state, and municipal government subsidies to US publicly traded firms over two decades, we predict and find evidence consistent with subsidies negatively impacting non-subsidized firms' market share and financial performance. Inferences are robust to entropy balancing on the factors associated with subsidy award probability and to using a stacked cohort difference-in-differences research design. Subsidies structured as loans, which offer only a temporary inflow of resources to competitors, pose a smaller competitive challenge to non-subsidized firms than non-loan subsidies. Findings are stronger for non-subsidized firms operating in less competitive markets and when non-subsidized firms are subject to greater financial constraints. Our study provides new insights regarding the competitive externalities of government corporate subsidies.
Do US Government Environmental Subsidies Improve Corporate Environmental Performance? with Allison Koester
[Link]
We analyze the relation between US government environmental subsidies — an important component of environmental tax and fiscal policy—on corporate environmental performance. Our sample includes over $48 billion in environmental subsidies awarded by US federal, state, and local governments from 2000 through 2021 to US publicly traded firms. Using facility-chemical-year data, we find that environmental subsidy amounts are unrelated to future waste intensity and negatively related to future pollution intensity for non-toxic chemicals, consistent with operational improvements for less severe chemicals. We also find that environmental subsidy amounts are associated with a decrease in future environmental regulatory violations and the occurrence, severity, and reach of publicly scrutinized environmental risk incidents, as well as an increase in future green (and non-green) innovation. These benefits are driven by subsidies in the form of loans, rather than in the form of cash grants and tax abatements/credits. Our collective findings suggest that while environmental subsidies are ineffective in curbing the most harmful types of pollution, they are associated with improvements in corporate environmental regulatory compliance and innovation.
The Impact of Government Subsidies on Firms’ Innovation Strategies, with Regi Kusumaatmadja
[Draft and Abstract available soon]
Evaluating Norway’s Electric Vehicle Incentives, with Øyvind Thomassen [SSRN] [Link], Energy Economics, Volume 146, May 2025, 108490
We use car registration data from 2000 to 2021, as well as price lists and tax rules, to evaluate Norway’s incentives for consumers to choose electric vehicles. These include taxes on fossil fuels, EV exemption from car purchase taxes, and other incentives, like discounts on road tolls. We find that undoing the incentive with the largest effect, the EV exemption from purchase taxes, would reduce the EV market share to 25 percent from the 66 percent observed in 2021, increase CO2 emissions of new cars sold by 167 percent, reduce their total weight by 22 percent, and reduce the number of new cars sold by 10 percent. Lost tax revenues imply a carbon price of 1700 USD per metric tonne. But taking into account consumer and producer surplus, the tax exemption is welfare enhancing even before putting a value on emissions reductions.
Electric Vehicle Ownership and Political Preferences in Norway, with Øyvind Thomassen [SSRN] [Link], Transportation Research Part D, Volume 139, February 2025, 104518
Using a representative survey of about 23,000 Norwegian households in the years 2020 to 2022, we find that electric vehicle (EV) ownership is strongly related to political preferences on the cosmopolitan/liberal vs. nationalist/traditional axis. Regression results, using car owners only, show that when we control for income, education, and other demographic variables, as well as year and municipality fixed effects, a one standard deviation shift in the nationalist/traditional direction reduces EV ownership by 5.4 percentage points relative to the sample mean among car owners (18.8 percent EV ownership). We also find a relationship between EV ownership and political preferences on the left vs. right axis, where right means favouring less state involvement in the economy. Here a one standard deviation shift towards the right results in a 2.9 percentage point increase in EV ownership ceteris paribus.
M.Sc. in Economics and Business Administration
Economics of the Environment and Climate (2021 - 2024)
Detecting Corporate Crime (2021 - 2024)
Econometrics for Business Research (2021 - 2025)
Thesis Supervision (2021 - 2025)
Microeconomics (2025 - )
Bachelor in International Business & Economics
Introduction to Economics (2025 - )
This code creates historical parent-subsidiary-year observations for the Good Jobs First (GJF) Subsidy Tracker data (https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/) by ensuring that a parent firm owns a subsidiary firm as of the subsidy award year using parent-subsidiary-year information from WRDS Subsidiaries.