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Previous studies of the effect of ridesharing on traffic fatalities have yielded inconsistent, often contradictory conclusions. In this paper we revisit this question using proprietary data from Uber measuring monthly rideshare activity at the Census tract level. Most previous studies are based on publicly-available information about Uber entry dates into US cities, but we show that an indicator variable for whether Uber is available is a poor measure of rideshare activity — for example, it explains less than 3% of the tract-level variation in ridesharing, reflecting the enormous amount of variation both within and across cities. Using entry we find inconsistent and statistically insignificant estimates. However, when we use the more detailed proprietary data, we find a robust negative impact of ridesharing on traffic fatalities. Impacts concentrate during nights and weekends and are robust across a range of alternative specifications. Overall, our results imply that ridesharing has decreased US alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1% and reduced total US traffic fatalities by 4.0%. Based on conventional estimates of the value of statistical life the annual life-saving benefits range from $2.3 to $5.4 billion. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that these benefits may be of similar magnitude to producer surplus captured by Uber shareholders or consumer surplus captured by Uber riders.

The growing "electrify everything" movement aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by transitioning households and firms away from natural gas toward electricity. This paper considers what this transition means for the customers who are left behind. Like most natural monopolies, natural gas utilities recover fixed costs by spreading fees out over time across their customer base. In periods of a shrinking customer base, this can lead to a lack of fixed cost recovery. To shed light on these dynamics, we use historical evidence from growing and shrinking utilities. We show that in the U.S. during the period 1997-2019 there are many growing utilities, but also hundreds of utilities that experienced sustained periods of customer loss. We then study how the loss of customers impacts utility operations and finances. Utilities that lose customers maintain their pipeline infrastructure even as the customer base financing their operations is shrinking. As a result, historical capital cost recovery and some operations and maintenance costs do not decrease. In keeping with this, we observe that utility revenues shrink, but less than one-for-one -- indicating higher bills for remaining customers. We highlight resulting equity implications -- both across income levels and across racial groups -- of the current push for building electrification and other energy transition policies. We conclude by discussing alternative utility financing options, such as recouping fixed costs through taxes rather than rates.

The percentage of U.S. homes heated with electricity has increased steadily from 1% in 1950, to 8% in 1970, to 26% in 1990, to 39% in 2018. This paper investigates the key determinants of this increase in electrification using data on heating choices from millions of U.S. households over a 70-year period. Energy prices, geography, climate, housing characteristics, and household income are shown to collectively explain 90% of the increase, with changing energy prices by far the most important single factor. This framework is then used to calculate the economic cost of an electrification mandate for new homes. Households in warm states are close to indifferent between electric and natural gas heating, so would be made worse off by less than $500 annually. Household in cold states, however, tend to strongly prefer natural gas so would be made worse off by $3000+ annually. These findings are directly relevant to a growing number of policies aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions through electrification, and underscore the importance of pricing energy efficiently. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Executive SummaryIn many countries, the revenue from gasoline taxes is used to fund highways and other transportation infrastructure. As the number of electric vehicles on the road increases, this ...

In an influential paper, Bertrand and Mullainathan (2001) show that energy executives are rewarded for high oil prices, which they term pay-for-luck. Almost twenty years later, performance-based pay as a portion of executive compensation has nearly doubled; total executive compensation has also nearly doubled; and new disclosure laws and tax rules have changed the regulatory landscape. In this paper, we examine whether their results and their interpretation continue to hold in this changing environment. We find that executive compensation at U.S. oil and gas companies is still closely tied to oil prices, indicating that executives continue to be rewarded for luck despite the increased availability of more sophisticated compensation mechanisms. This finding is robust to including time-varying controls for the firms' scale of operations, and it holds not only for total executive compensation but also for several of the separate individuals components of compensation, including bonuses. Moreover, we show there is less pay-for-luck in better-governed companies, and that pay-for-luck is asymmetric – rising with increasing oil prices more than it falls with decreasing oil prices. These patterns are more consistent with rent extraction by executives than with maximizing shareholder value.

Retail petroleum markets in Mexico are on the cusp of a historic deregulation. For decades, all 11,000 gasoline stations nationwide have carried the brand of the state-owned petroleum company Pemex and sold Pemex gasoline at federally regulated retail prices. This industry structure is changing, however, as part of Mexico's broader energy reforms aimed at increasing private investment. Since April 2016, independent companies can import, transport, store, distribute, and sell gasoline and diesel. In this paper, we provide an economic perspective on Mexico's nascent deregulation. Although in many ways the reforms are unprecedented, we argue that past experiences in other markets give important clues about what to expect, as well as about potential pitfalls. Turning Mexico's retail petroleum sector into a competitive market will not be easy, but the deregulation has the potential to increase efficiency and, eventually, to reduce prices.Keywords: Market Deregulation, Gasoline Stations, Price Competition, Product Differentiation, Vertical Integration

There is a widely-held view that as demand for travel goes up, this decreases not only speed but also the capacity of the road system, a phenomenon known as hypercongestion. We revisit this idea. We propose two empirical tests motivated by previous analytical models of hypercongestion. Our first test uses instrumental variables to empirically isolate the effect of travel demand on highway capacity. Our second test uses an event study analysis to measure changes in highway capacity at the onset of queue formation. We apply these tests to three highway bottlenecks in California for which detailed data on traffic flows and vehicles speeds are available. Neither test shows evidence of a reduction in highway capacity at any site during periods of high demand. Across sites and specifications we have sufficient statistical power to rule out small reductions in highway capacity. This lack of evidence of hypercongestion has important implications for travel supply and demand models and raises questions about highway metering lights and other traffic interventions aimed at regulating demand.

Despite widespread agreement that a carbon tax would be more efficient, many countries use fuel economy standards to reduce transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions. We pair a simple...

Since 2006, U.S. households have received more than $18 billion in federal income tax credits for weatherizing their homes, installing solar panels, buying hybrid and electric vehicles, and other "clean energy" investments. We use tax return data to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of program recipients. We find that these tax expenditures have gone predominantly to higher-income Americans. The bottom three income quintiles have received about 10% of all credits, while the top quintile has received about 60%. The most extreme is the program aimed at electric vehicles, where we find that the top income quintile has received about 90% of all credits. By comparing to previous work on the distributional consequences of pricing greenhouse gas emissions, we conclude that tax credits are likely to be much less attractive on distributional grounds than market mechanisms to reduce GHGs.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

In this paper, we exploit the abrupt closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station to estimate the value of electricity transmission. Following the plant’s closure in February 2012, we nd that as much as 75% of lost generation during high demand hours was met locally. Although lower-cost production was available elsewhere, transmission constraints and other physical limitations of the grid severely limited the ability of other producers to sell into the southern California market. These constraints also made it potentially more protable for certain plants to exercise market power, and we nd evidence consistent with one company acting non-competitively.

A ubiquitous and largely unquestioned assumption in studies of housing markets is that there is perfect information about local amenities. This paper measures the housing market and health impacts of 1,600 openings and closings of industrial plants that emit toxic pollutants. We find that housing values within one mile decrease by 1.5 percent when plants open, and increase by 1.5 percent when plants close. This implies an aggregate loss in housing values per plant of about $1.5 million. While the housing value impacts are concentrated within 1/2 mile, we find statistically significant infant health impacts up to one mile away.

While public discussion of HR 2454 (the "Waxman Markey" bill) has focused on the cap-andtrade program that would be established for carbon emissions, the bill also includes provisions that would tighten energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances. Supporters argue that appliance standards help address a number of market failures. In particular, many studies have pointed out that landlords may buy cheap inefficient appliances when their tenants pay the utility bill. Although this landlord-tenant problem has been widely discussed in the literature, there is little empirical evidence on the magnitude of the distortion. This paper compares appliance ownership patterns between homeowners and renters using household-level data from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey. The results show that, controlling for household income and other household characteristics, renters are significantly less likely to have energy efficient refrigerators, clothes washers and dishwashers.

Previous studies of trade and the environment overwhelmingly focus on how trade affects where goods are produced. However, trade also affects where goods are consumed. In this paper we describe a model of trade with durable goods and non‐homothetic preferences. In autarky, lowquality (used) goods are relatively inexpensive in high‐income countries and free trade causes these goods to be exported to low‐income countries. We then evaluate the environmental consequences of this pattern of trade using evidence from the North American Free Trade Agreement. Since trade restrictions were eliminated for used cars in 2005, over 2.5 million used cars have been exported from the United States to Mexico. Using a unique, vehicle‐level dataset, we find that traded vehicles are dirtier than the stock of vehicles in the United States and cleaner than the stock in Mexico, so trade leads average vehicle emissions to decrease in both countries. Total greenhouse gas emissions increase, primarily because trade gives new life to vehicles that otherwise would have been scrapped.