Salience of carbon taxes in the gasoline market

Nicholas Rivers and Brandon Schaufele

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2015, vol. 74, issue C, 23-36

Abstract: We demonstrate that the carbon tax imposed by the Canadian province of British Columbia caused a decline in short-run gasoline demand that is significantly greater than would be expected from an equivalent increase in the market price of gasoline. That the carbon tax is more salient, or yields a larger change in demand than equivalent market price movements, is robust to a range of specifications. As a result of the large consumer response to the tax, we calculate that during its first four years, the tax reduced carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline consumption by 2.4 million tonnes.

Keywords: Carbon tax; Tax salience; Environmental pricing; Gasoline demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 H29 Q41 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (109)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0095069615000613
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeeman:v:74:y:2015:i:c:p:23-36

DOI: 10.1016/j.jeem.2015.07.002

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management is currently edited by M.A. Cole, A. Lange, D.J. Phaneuf, D. Popp, M.J. Roberts, M.D. Smith, C. Timmins, Q. Weninger and A.J. Yates

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().