MTI Distinguished Seminar Series: Gianluca Trotta

The MTI Distinguished Seminar Series welcomed Gianluca Trotta, senior energy economist at COWI, on May 6 for talk entitled "The Effect of Changing Registration Taxes on Electric Vehicle Adoption: Evidence from Denmark."

As Denmark makes the transition to a low-carbon economy, large-scale deployment of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is a key part of the equation.. The country has traditionally stimulated use of BEVs through a registration tax exemption that was lifted in 2016 and partially re-introduced in 2018. Exploiting car registration as well as detailed population data covering the period 2013-2019 and using Bayesian additive regression trees (BART), Trotta has obtained new empirical evidence on the effects of the registration tax evolution on the adoption of BEVs in Denmark and the socioeconomic factors that influence BEV adoption.

The results suggest that the number of BEVs would have been higher if the tax exemption had remained. Moreover, Trotta's study detected heterogeneous treatment effects that are larger the more likely a socio-economic group is to purchase a BEV. Consequently, it found substantial freerider effects in the promotion of BEVs via the tax system.

About the Speaker

Gianluca Trotta holds a PhD in Economics, Law and Institutions from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Rome, Italy). His main research interests are energy efficiency, energy behavior, and energy policy. Given his educational background in Economics, Law and Political Science - Bachelor’s Degree, two Masters and PhD - with a special focus on energy and environmental issues, he focuses on analyzing energy topics by combining both the economic and policy approach and perspective. During his doctoral studies, he lived one year in Sweden working in the Centre for Environmental and Resource Economics (CERE) and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Umeå, Sweden).

Published May 15, 2022