The effect of registration taxes on new car sales and emissions: Evidence from Switzerland

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract. In Switzerland, the annual circulation taxes on road vehicles are set by and paid to the cantons (not to the federal government). We exploit the 26 different circulation tax rules and their variation over time, which we interpret as a natural experiment, to see if linking them to a vehicle's CO 2 emissions rate has helped shift new car sales towards lower-emitting vehicles. We find that even when the penalty associated with a highly polluting vehicle is high, the effect is relatively small. For example, in canton Zurich, imposing a 50% "malus" on the annual registration fee for cars that emit 200 or more grams of CO 2 per kilometer reduces the average CO 2 emissions rate from new cars by only 0.46 gram per kilometer, bringing it to 158.11 grams per kilometer in 2011. A similar effect would be attained with a modest increase in fuel taxes. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

The impact of emissions-based taxes on the retirement of used and inefficient vehicles: The case of Switzerland

“…A second trend in the literature has carried out ex-post evaluations of actual emissions-linked taxes (Klier and Linn, 2015;Stitzing, 2015;Ciccone, 2015;Schaufele, 2014, andRogan et al, 2011;and Cerruti et al, 2016) or bonus/malus schemes (Klier and Linn, 2015;D'Haultfoeuille et al, 2014, Huse andLucinda, 2013;and Alberini and Bareit, 2016). All of these studies have focused on the effects on the sales of new cars, even though imposing taxes on new cars presumably has effects on the used car market and on scrappage rates (Bento et al, 2013).…”

“…With the Hyundai Santamo, retirement is postponed by 5.04 months. These calculations show that a malus scheme expected to discourage people from buying highly polluting cars (see Alberini and Bareit, 2016) can be counterproductive in the sense that it can encourage people to hold on to their existing high-emitter. The effect on the age of the vehicles at retirement varies across cars.…”

Charging Drivers by the Pound: The Effects of the UK Vehicle Tax System

“…The empirical estimation strategy follows a reduced-form approach similar to that taken by Klier and Linn (2015) and Alberini and Bareit (2016) for other European countries. In our regressions, the dependent variable is the log registrations by model-trim variant i, make m, and period t, normalized by the number of months in the policy period: 9…”

“…The literature has typically estimated the average effect of CO 2 taxes on new vehicle registrations, finding that the taxes reduce average new vehicle emissions rates (e.g., Adamou et al 2012;Ciccone 2014;D'Haultfoeuille et al 2014;Konishi and Meng 2014;Klier and Linn 2015;Alberini and Bareit 2016;Yan and Eskeland 2016). A common approach to estimating consumer responses to vehicle taxes is to assume that consumers respond to the vehicle tax the same way they respond to the vehicle price.…”

“… See Berry 1994;Berry et al 1995;Vance and Mehlin 2009;Adamou et al 2012Adamou et al , 2014Huse and Lucinda 2014;Konishi and Meng 2014;Grigolon et al 2015;Alberini and Bareit 2016. To construct the BLP instruments, we use the average of the natural log of the characteristics of vehicles, once for vehicles within the same make and period and once for vehicles in a different make or period.…”