Robert Huang, University of Southern California
In the United States, the transportation sector contributes to 30% of the total emissions, 58% of which are produced by private passenger vehicles. One barrier of mass electric vehicle adoption is the lack of public chargers. Using a panel dataset on over 1800 Californian ZIP codes from 2010 to 2021, I employ a shift-share instrumental variable to estimate the EV demand elasticity with respect to chargers and the heterogenous treatment effects of public charger deployments. I document that a 1% increase in charger counts leads to a 0.7% to 1.1% increase in EV sales on average, with a larger increase in upper-middle income suburbs. I also use the difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the differential treatment effect of fast versus regular chargers. While PHEVs are incompatible with fast chargers, early deployments of fast chargers significantly boost BEV sales.
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