Strategic Entry and Policy in Isolated EV Charging Markets (Job Market Paper)
This paper studies how firms compete in isolated electric vehicle (EV) charging markets and whether the resulting network is spatially efficient. I assemble a novel dataset with high-frequency, connector-level energy delivered across public EV chargers in Greece, providing a direct measure of utilization rarely observed in charging markets. I focus on 42 islands, which form well-defined local markets with no cross-market substitution. Combining a nested-logit demand model, markups under multiproduct Bertrand competition, and a static spatial entry model, I document three facts. First, demand is price elastic (a market-level elasticity of about -3) and chargers within a power tier are close substitutes, resulting in thin markups (a median of about 7%) and limited scope for price competition. Second, competition operates on location, yet entry follows touristic demand: new sites cluster where demand and capacity already concentrate rather than filling spatial gaps. Third, the network is spatially misallocated: only about half of tourist demand lies within one kilometer of a charger; reallocating the existing stock would raise this share to over 80%. A fixed-price counterfactual shows that recent expansion was valuable to consumers (removing it lowers consumer surplus by roughly 10%), yet the same chargers, better placed, would serve far more demand. Public support should therefore target spatial coverage rather than the number of chargers deployed.
The Effect of Consumer Information on Tax Pass-Through (with Lukas Brunninger and Klaus Gugler)
For the effectiveness of policy interventions, it is of prime importance that firms pass on e.g. changes in tax or subsidy policy onto consumers. Thus, economic research should give guidance which characteristics of markets are more or less conducive to pass-through. In this paper, we test the prediction from canonical search models that more informed consumers increase the pass-through rate of tax changes. We analyze the 2022 excise-duty tax change in the German retail gasoline market using novel search-intensity data from a large price comparison website and France as the control group. Our station-level market definition utilizes information provided by consumers on their chosen search radii. The consumer-information effect on tax pass-through is positive and concave as predicted by theory, but evidence on increased effectiveness of consumer search in low-competition markets is not conclusive.
