Title

Fuel Tax Incidence and Policy

Time

1:40 p.m. – 3:00 p.m

Location

1605 Tilia, Room 1103, West Village

Abstract

Fuel taxes are one of the most common policy approaches to financing infrastructure and address market failures associated with motor vehicle use. This talk will discuss three of my recent research papers examining: (1) do consumers or producers bear the economic incidence of fuel taxes, (2) how do consumers respond to fuel taxes and (3) how do producers respond to fuel taxes.

Biographical Sketch

Erich Muehlegger is an assistant professor in the economics department at UC Davis and a faculty research fellow at the NBER. Formerly, he was on the faculty at Harvard Kennedy School, a fellow of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and former faculty chair of the Regulatory Policy Program. His research interests include industrial organization, public finance and  environmental policy, especially in the context of the energy and transportation sectors. His research focuses on how regulatory policy can be used to affect the decisions of firms and consumers and, in particular, how insights can be used to design better regulations and incentives. His work has been published in top academic journals and covered by the popular press, television and radio. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.