THREE ESSAYS ON ENERGY ECONOMICS

Wentao Zhang

In the first chapter, I estimate the impacts of availability of public charging infrastructure on ownership and utilization of electric vehicles (EVs) across the populous U.S. metropolitan areas. I combine a dataset of vehicle ownership and self-reported annualized miles from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey with location data of charging stations. Employing Heckman selection model with instruments to tackle the endogeneity, my results show that the spatial availability of public charging stations has significantly positive effects on electric vehicle ownership and utilization through relieving “range anxiety”. An increase of 10 public charging stations per 100 square miles raises the probability of EV ownership by 0.1% and enhances electric vehicle mile traveled by 30-40%. In the second chapter, I develop a conceptual framework and examine the factors driving household cooking fuel choice in recent China and the impacts of cooking fuel adoption on subjective well-being. I employ a large household-level panel dataset from five waves of China Family Panel Studies 2010-2018. Applying ordered choice models with random effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity, I find that household adoptions of clean and energy-efficiency cooking fuels are positively related to high economic status, good living conditions, high education attainment, and female household head. Using clean and modern cooking fuels significantly enhances peoples’ life satisfaction and optimism for the future probably through reducing household air pollution and facilitating cooking work, particularly for the female and the elderly. In the third chapter, I estimate the impacts of energy subsidies on firm output and labor productivity in developing economics. I use a large firm-level dataset from World Bank Enterprise Surveys across a wide range of countries with estimated pre-tax and post-tax energy subsidies. After instrumenting for the potential endogeneity, I find that fossil fuel subsidies have overall significant negative effects on firm output and labor productivity. The negative effects of energy subsidies are smaller for small and medium-sized enterprises while become larger for energy-intensive manufacturing firms. My findings indicate that energy subsidies hurt firm performance probably through undermining the incentives of innovation and crowding out government expenditures on public goods.

THREE ESSAYS ON ENERGY ECONOMICS

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