Carbon Pricing Policies and Their Effect on Greenhouse Gas and Criteria Emissions

This project seeks to study the impact of pricing greenhouse gases on both greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions. The project will bring together a variety of unique datasets that especially suited to answer these questions and examine several broad research questions and study both the extensive (which vehicles people buy and when do they scrap their current vehicle) and the intensive (how many miles do they drive) margins. The project will bring together a number of unique datasets that are unusually suited for answering these questions. The ultimate goal is to test the idea that many policy makers have that increasing the cost of driving has little affect on consumer behavior and thus emissions. This viewpoint is not unique to the transportation industry. The project will add to our broader understanding of how consumers respond to increases in the cost of driving and how this response affects emissions. In addition, it will argue and empirically show that the elasticity of miles traveled with respect to gas prices is the wrong metric for considering how pricing policies influence vehicle emissions because it ignores important heterogeneities in this sensitivity measure.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $70510.00
• Contract Numbers:

  DTRT06-G-0022

  R05-1

• Sponsor Organizations:

  California Department of Transportation

  1227 O Street
  Sacramento, CA  United States  95843
• Performing Organizations:

  Sustainable Transportation Center/ITS-Davis

  ITS-Davis
  University of California, Davis
  Davis, CA  United States  95616
• Principal Investigators:

  Knittel, Christopher

• Start Date: 20101001
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 20120930
• Source Data: RiP Project 28177

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air quality management; Automobile ownership; Carbon; Consumer behavior; Consumer preferences; Greenhouse gases; Pollutants; Pricing
• Uncontrolled Terms: Highway user costs; Vehicle choice
• Subject Areas: Energy; Highways; Policy; I15: Environment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01468027
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: University of California Transportation Center/Institute of Transportation Studies
• Contract Numbers: DTRT06-G-0022, R05-1
• Files: UTC, RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jan 3 2013 3:43PM