Photo of Erich Muehlegger

Erich Muehlegger is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His research interests include industrial organization, public finance, economic regulation, and environmental policy.

Muehlegger received his BA from Williams College in 1997 and his PhD from MIT in 2005. He taught at the Harvard Kennedy School from 2005-2014 and has taught at UC Davis since 2014.

 

 

Recent Research Highlights

Ideology, Incidence and the Political Economy of Fuel Taxes: Evidence from the California 2018 Proposition 6 (with Lucas Epstein)

In 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 6, a ballot initiative that sought to repeal state gasoline taxes and vehicle fees enacted as part of the 2017 Road Repair and Accountability Act. We study the relationship between support for the proposition, political ideology and the economic burdens imposed by the Act. For every hundred dollars of annual per-household imposed costs, we estimate that support for the proposition rose by 3 - 9 percentage points. Notably, we find that the relationship between voting and the economic burden of the policy is seven times stronger in the most conservative tracts relative to the most liberal tracts. Since conservative areas in California and elsewhere tend to bear a higher burden from transportation and energy taxes than liberal areas, heterogeneity in the response to economic burdens has important implications for the popular support for environmental taxes and the ongoing policy debate about how to finance future road infrastructure.

Energy Prices and Electric Vehicle Adoption (with James Bushnell and David Rapson), Revisions requested at JPE: Micro

This paper provides the first evidence on how electric vehicle (EV) sales respond to energy prices. Using EV registrations in California, we use a border-discontinuity strategy exploiting sharp changes in residential electricity prices between utilities. EV sales are six times more sensitive to gasoline prices than to electricity prices. However, EV retention decreases with local electricity prices, suggesting that owners learn by experience about operating costs. Results inform optimal subsidy and tax policy. If consumers underestimate EV cost of ownership, optimal purchase incentives combine a subsidy to address external benefits with a tax to address consumer mis-optimization.

Global Transportation Decarbonization (with David Rapson), Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2023

Replacing fossil fuels in the name of decarbonization is necessary but will be difficult due to their as-yet unrivaled bundle of attributes: abundance, ubiquity, energy density, transportability and cost. There is a growing commitment to electrification as the dominant decarbonization pathway. While deep electrification is promising for road transportation in wealthy countries, it will face steep obstacles. In other sectors and in the developing world, it's not even in pole position. Global transportation decarbonization will require decoupling emissions from economic growth, and decoupling emissions from growth will require not only new technologies, but cooperation in governance. The menu of policy options is replete with tradeoffs, particularly as the primacy of energy security and reliability (over emissions abatement) has once again been demonstrated in Europe and elsewhere.