Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/296006 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 10917
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
This article exploits both the crude oil price surge consecutive to the invasion of Ukraine and 2022 fuel excise tax rebates in France as quasi-natural experiments to infer the price sensitivity of fuel demand. Based on granular individual bank account data at the transaction level, we properly disentangle anticipation effects from price effects, and estimate an average price elasticity of -0.31. It varies little with respect to income and location but substantially decreases, in absolute, with respect to fuel spending and is higher for retirees. We evaluate financial and distributional effects of the actual tax policy as well as its impact on CO2 emissions based on counterfactual simulations. We empirically demonstrate that resorting to transfers, be they targeted or not, achieves only imperfect compensation against fuel inflation. However, we show that a policy maker subject to a tight budget constraint and seeking to alleviate excessive losses, relative to income, prefers means-tested transfers to rebates.
Subjects: 
commodity taxation
excise tax
tax-and-transfer schemes
fuel price elasticity
anticipatory behaviour
transaction-level data
JEL: 
C18
C51
D12
H23
H31
L71
Q31
Q35
Q41
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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