Research
What’s Driving High Electric Vehicle Fast Charging Prices? (Job Market Paper) link
Abstract: Electric vehicle fast charging is more costly than home charging, which could slow electric vehicle adoption and place higher costs on lower income households that cannot charge at home. I compile novel data on station quantities, prices, and marginal operating costs to shed light on price setting behavior across charging networks. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I show that contrary to standard theory, stations do not lower prices in response to nearby competitor entry. I estimate a model of heterogeneous consumer demand for fast charging and use the elasticities from the demand model to calculate the separate sets of social surplus maximizing prices. I show that charging prices include a large markup above what is necessary to recover fixed costs, and lowering prices to the efficient prices would increase social surplus by 7-10%. Contrary to most settings, the optimal linear and two-part tariff prices that recover fixed costs are nearly the same. In the presence of charging station capacity constraints, equating quantity demanded and supplied requires increasing efficient prices above the marginal operating costs. These results suggest that increasing competition can only reduce markups by half, and policy would need to address charging supply or inelastic consumer demand to further reduce markups.
Takeoffs and Test Scores: The Impact of Noise Pollution on Standardized Test Performance link
Abstract: Noise pollution is ubiquitous in urban life, but little is known about its effects on educational attainment. I estimate the causal effect of noise pollution on standardized test performance by isolating exogenous variation in aircraft noise pollution and implementing a value-added model to account for differences in student ability. I find a large negative impact on math test performance, but no impact on English Language Art test performance. Moving from a school at the 25th percentile of exposure to one at the 75th percentile is associated with a math test score reduction of 0.1 standard deviations, twice as large as the impact of missing 10 school days during the year. I find similar results using a second identification strategy that leverages changes in aircraft noise from the introduction of new flight paths. These findings suggest a potentially large value to investments in noise insulation for schools exposed to high levels of noise pollution.