Electrification of private transport: prices, policy and equity

The proposed project analyzes how electrification of private transports and the demand for electric vehicles depend on prices of cars and fuels, and how the sensitivity to prices differs across socio-economic groups (e.g., gender, income and where in the country the car purchaser lives).

This information is necessary to design efficient policies, to understand equity of different policies, and to ensure a socially sustainable transition of the private transport sector.

The project uses unique data from Statistics Sweden that combines information from the car registry with detailed information about car purchasers from registry data.

To measure the effect of price changes on the demand for electric vehicles, the project exploits the large spatial variation in electricity prices across pricing areas and distribution areas, and the removal of the subsidy to electric vehicles in late 2022.

These events, that can be seen as natural experiments, allow for a causal interpretation of the effect of price changes on the demand for electric vehicles.