Consumer Response to Stricter Fuel Economy Standards
Time: January 13,2012 , 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Location: 1065 Kemper Hall, UC Davis
Speaker: David Brownstone, STC Distinguished Speaker, Dept. of Economics, UC Irvine
Title: Consumer Response to Stricter Fuel Economy Standards
Abstract: Jinwon Kim, Alicia LLoro, and Phillip Li, Department of Economics, UC Irvine
The impacts of recent changes in Federal light-vehicle fuel economy standards depend crucially on consumers’ response to new vehicles with higher fuel economy and higher prices. Previous studies have primarily relied on stated preference experiments since there was little independent variation in vehicle price, fuel economy, and performance. The recent introduction of hybrid-electric vehicles has provided some independent variation in these key vehicle attributes, so we use data from the 2009 NHTS data to estimate willingness to pay for light vehicle fuel economy. We also estimate the “rebound effect” of purchasing more fuel efficient vehicles. Finally we will comment on the impact of measurement errors and partial observablility on previous studies.
Biographical Sketch: David Brownstone is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, and he is also a member of UCI’s Institute of Transportation Studies and Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences. Before coming to UCI in 1984, Brownstone taught economics at Princeton University and the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden. Professor Brownstone has studied the impacts of tax reform on housing demand, the impacts of measurement errors in economic surveys, the demand for alternative-fueled vehicles, and the impacts of carpool lanes and road pricing. His current research is using new detailed data to study the impacts of urban form on household vehicle choice and utilization. He is also working with the same data to build a new model to analyze the impacts of the recently increased Federal light vehicle fuel economy standards. Professor Brownstone has served as an expert consultant for toll road, high speed rail, and other major transportation projects in Orange County, California, Australia, and The Netherlands. In addition to his applied work, Brownstone was one of the first econometricians to apply bootstrapping and multiple imputations to generate valid inferences in complex models. Together with Kenneth Train and David Bunch he was one of the first to apply mixed logit models in household vehicle demand and transportation mode choice models. Brownstone’s recent work on measuring the impact of the built environment on household vehicle type choice and utilization uses new Bayesian models and estimation techniques that may be useful in other applications. Brownstone has published many articles in top economics and transportation journals, and he currently serves on the editorial boards of Transportation Research (Part B: Methodological) and Foundations and Trends in Econometrics.