Working Papers
The welfare impact of using second-best uniform taxes to address traffic congestion (with Nicolas Koch)
This paper uses a novel GPS-coded dataset for more than three million car trips in the four largest German cities to measure the efficiency losses from using uniform fuel taxes as a second-best optimal tax to reduce traffic congestion. We estimate the short-run price elasticity of vehicle-kilometres travelled (VKT) across different hours of the day from a panel gravity equation. Identification of the price elasticity relies on comparing VKT changes between granular trip origin and destination pairs within each city. We find that the VKT price elasticity differs strongly across trips taken at different hours of the day, and that this elasticity correlates with contributions to the congestion externality. Using a policy simulation, we show that 52% of the deadweight loss of the congestion externality remains after levying a uniform fuel tax.
Carbon pricing and credit re-allocation (with Christian Bittner, Martin Götz, Nicolas Koch)
This paper studies the role of climate policy in the transmission of monetary policy to bank credit supply. We use a confidential loan-level dataset with bank- and firm-level balance sheet and carbon emissions data, to estimate the impact of an exogenous bank-level liquidity shock on lending to firms participating in the European emissions trading system (ETS). We find that banks more strongly affected by the shock increase lending to ETS firms. A 0.1 increase in the deposits-to-asset ratio increases lending by between 0.17% and 0.42%. Banks also decrease the default probabilities for their loan exposures to ETS firms, indicating that the marginal loan to ETS companies are perceived as safer.
The effect of information framing on policy support: Experimental evidence from urban policies (with Théo Konc, Linus Mattauch and Stephan Sommer)
We administer a large-scale representative survey with randomised video treatments to test how different policy framings affect citizens' attitudes towards urban tolls in the two largest European metropolitan areas without tolls, Berlin-Brandenburg and Paris-Ile de France. Information significantly increases policy support. Our air pollution treatment increases support by 11 percentage points, information on climate change and time savings increase support by 7 and 6 percentage points, respectively. Treatment effects change views more strongly in the Paris-Ile de France region, where initial support for an urban toll is low. Treatment effects vary by education level, income and place of residence in urban and suburban areas. Our findings imply that precise and targeted communication of co-benefits can increase the acceptability of urban tolls across population groups.
Registered as AEARCTR-0010783.
Other work-in-progress
"A taxonomy of policies to support Greenhouse Gas Removal", joint with Siyu Feng, Joseph Stemmler, Sam Fankhauser and Steve Smith.
"Impacts of biomass extraction on forest carbon stocks: Evidence from Europe", joint with Sam Fankhauser and Steve Smith.