Do electric vehicle incentives matter? Evidence from the 50 U.S. states

Abstract

Highlights • We assemble a data set with U.S. state-level policies for EVs from 2010 to 2015. • We estimate the effectiveness of policy incentives on EV adoption in U.S. states. • A $1000 increase in value of EV policies results in 5–11% more new EV registrations. • Regression results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. Abstract We estimate the effectiveness of policy incentives for adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in the 50 U.S. states. We employ a rich dataset of semi-annual state-level new EV vehicle registrations by make and model from 2010 to 2015 and state-level policy instruments that could affect new EV model registrations. We construct two measures of policy, one which aggregates policy instruments that can be assigned a value and a second that aggregates those without explicit values. Using a within model difference-in-difference estimator with high-dimensional fixed effects, we find that a $1000 increase in the value of a state’s model-specific EV policies increases registrations of that model within the state by 5–11%.