Labour economics

Price elasticity of demand

Low income

Exploit

Microeconomics

Chromatography

Income elasticity of demand

Computer security

Economics

Market economy

Computer science

Business

Subsidy

Demographic economics

Public economics

Sociology

Chemistry

Programming language

Database transaction

Sample (material)

Consumption (sociology)

Agricultural economics

Social science

Journal of Public Economics

Little is known about electric vehicle (EV) demand by low- and middle-income households. In this paper, we exploit a policy that provides exogenous variation in large EV subsidies targeted at the mass market in California. Using transaction-level data, we estimate three important policy parameters: the rate of subsidy pass-through, the impact of the subsidy on EV adoption, and the elasticity of demand for EVs among low- and middle-income households. Demand for EVs in our sample is price-elastic (−2.1) and buyers capture roughly 73 to 85 percent of the subsidy.

Subsidizing low- and middle-income adoption of electric vehicles: Quasi-experimental evidence from California