Marie-Louise Arlt
University of Bayreuth
The Role of Public Investment in Building Up an Electric Vehicle Charging Grid
Monday, November 25, 2024 – 05:15 – 06:30 PM (CET)
To join in person, just come to the room O 148 (i.e., in the castle, building Schloss Ostflügel, level 1, room 148). To join virtually, please register in advance using this link.
Seminar Abstract
The transition from conventional cars to electric vehicles requires a suitable public charging infrastructure. In this paper, I investigate the role of direct public investment, such as by municipality-owned utilities, in building up a charging grid. First, I provide a two-sided model of electric vehicle adoption and charging station investment. Extending existing adoption models, I introduce public investment and show that public investment can crowd out private investment in the short-run. However, it may spur accelerated and larger private investor entry in the long-run. I illustrate my results using numerical examples. Second, I empirically test the predictions of my model. For that purpose, I build a novel panel data set of municipality-level charging markets in Germany, including charging stations and electric vehicle registrations. For identification, I leverage the fact that municipalities in Germany differ substantially in the share of charging stations owned by publicly-owned investors. To correct for selection biases, I use methods of matching and synthetic control to mediate the identification problem. I find that municipalities with publicly-owned local investors experience higher numbers of installed charging stations. Moreover, I investigate whether public investment is effective in incentivizing private investment, or whether it discourages private investors. I find first evidence of the latter.
Speaker Bio
Marie-Louise Arlt is Assistant Professor at the University of Bayreuth and the Bavarian Center for Battery Technology (BayBatt). Her research focuses on new technologies in the energy and mobility sectors and how to leverage economic tools and institutions to enable their optimal integration and deployment to mitigate climate change. She works at the interface of economics, information systems, and engineering.
Previously, She was a Junior Research Group Leader at the ifo Institute and a Postdoctoral fellow at the Chair for Comparative Economics at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme). She graduated from Freiburg University in October 2020 and, during her PhD studies, has worked at and with Stanford University, SLAC, and Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
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