Après VW qui avait largement médiatisé son analyse, Reuters faisait état cette semaine de déclarations de Thierry Bolloré qui, lors d’une réunion interne en juillet, aurait émis des doutes quant à la profitabilité d’investissements futurs sur ces motorisations : comme le souligne Reuters, après avoir fait de la résistance et tenté de réaffirmer tout l’intérêt du Diesel et toutes les améliorations obtenues et à attendre, les deux français semblent bien – comme VW – jeter l’éponge et intégrer la nouvelle donne issue de l’affaire VW.
Presentation
How do the U.S. and Europe regulate fuel efficiency? Is there evidence that regulation leads to technology adoption?
The presentation will first give an overview of the different regulatory systems employed on both sides of the Atlantic to improve fuel efficiency of light vehicles. Then the seminar will focus specifically on the question of technology-inducing effects of regulation in the vehicle sector – many countries have been tightening passenger vehicle fuel economy standards.
The paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of fuel economy standards on technology adoption. We investigate changes in the rate and direction of technology adoption, that is, the extent to which technology is used to increase fuel economy at the expense of other vehicle attributes.
We find that recent changes in U.S. and European standards have both increased the rate of technology adoption and affected the direction of technology adoption. Producers reduced horsepower and torque compared to a counterfactual in which fuel economy standards remained unchanged.
We estimate opportunity costs from reduced horsepower and torque to be economically significant relative to the gains from fuel savings.
Reference
The discussed paper will be published in January 2016 in the Journal of Public Economics: lire la suite
