Publications [#164651] of Christopher D. Timmins

Journal Articles

1. Shanjun Li and Roger H. Von Haefen and Christopher Timmins, How Do Gasoline Prices Affect Fleet Fuel Economy?, SSRN (October, 2008)
   (last updated on 2009/10/22)

   Abstract:
   Several recent studies have compared gasoline taxes and CAFE standards and have concluded that increasing the gasoline tax is more cost-effective. When evaluating the policy options, two important behavioral drivers are: (1) the utilization effect, or the responsiveness of vehicles miles traveled (VMT) to fluctuations in gasonline prices, and (2) the compositional effect, or the responsiveness of fleet fuel economy to gasoline price changes. Although a large body of empirical evidence on the magnitude of the utilization effect now exists (see Small and Van Dender (2007) and Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling (2008) for summaries and recent contributions), less evidence exists on the size of the compositional effect. This is the focus of our paper.

   Keywords:
   Fuel-inefficient vehicle • Gasoline • MPG • VMT