Sarah Armitage
Cross-State Spillovers of Regulation Under National Pricing Strategies: Evidence from Electric Vehicles
Boston University
Monday, October 13, 2025 –05:15 – 06:30 PM (CEST)
This session will be held as a hybrid event. To join in person, you can come to room O 131 (i.e., room 131 on level 1 of the east wing of the castle). To join virtually, please register in advance using this link.
Seminar Abstract
When policies differ across regions but prices are not set independently across regions, the equivalency between demand- and supply-side policy instruments breaks down. Drawing on price discrimination theory, we show that regional demand-side tools such as consumer subsidies generate effective price variation across regions for a product, while producer subsidies do not, creating different incentives for firms and ultimately different policy responses. We study the interaction between firms' pricing strategies and the US state-level Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) policy that gives automobile manufacturers incentives to sell electric vehicles in California and nine other states. Focusing on 2012–17, we build and estimate a structural model of the market for new passenger vehicles, examining the impacts of the ZEV program in the regulated region and spillovers to other states. We compare the ZEV policy to a counterfactual demand-side subsidy and tax that holds incentives per vehicle in ZEV states fixed. Under the assumption that Tesla sets national prices, our estimates imply that the demand-side policy would increase electric vehicle sales in the US by 13%.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Armitage is an Assistant Professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, with a disciplinary focus on environmental economics, industrial organization, and public finance.
During the 2022–2023 academic year, Sarah was an Economist Fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a consultant at Industrial Economics, Inc., supporting state and federal government clients on a variety of environmental projects, and as a research assistant at MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. She has also served as an Impact Fellow at Prime Coalition, overseeing Prime's inaugural impact audit of investments with gigaton-scale emissions reduction potential.
She holds an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and a B.A. in History from Yale University.
Admission information
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