IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_11871.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pigovian Transport Pricing in Practice

Author

Listed:
  • Beat Hintermann
  • Beaumont Schoemann
  • Joseph Molloy
  • Thomas Götschi
  • Alberto Castro
  • Christopher Tchervenkov
  • Uros Tomic
  • Kay W. Axhausen

Abstract

We implement Pigovian transport pricing in a field experiment in urban agglomerations of Switzerland over the course of 8 weeks. Our pricing considers the external costs from climate damages, health outcomes from pollution, accidents and physical activity, and congestion. It varies across time, space and mode of transport and is deducted from a budget provided to GPS-tracked participants. The treatment reduces the external costs of transport by 4.6% during the course of the experiment. The main underlying mechanism is a shift away from driving towards other modes, such as public transport, walking and cycling. Providing information about the external costs of transport alone is insufficient to change the transport behavior for the sample majority. We compute the welfare improvement due to mode shift to be 77 Swiss francs (or US dollars) per person and year, and that a fuel tax would achieve 70% of this gain.

Suggested Citation

  • Beat Hintermann & Beaumont Schoemann & Joseph Molloy & Thomas Götschi & Alberto Castro & Christopher Tchervenkov & Uros Tomic & Kay W. Axhausen, 2025. "Pigovian Transport Pricing in Practice," CESifo Working Paper Series 11871, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11871
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11871.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    transport pricing; Pigovian taxation; mobility; transportation; external costs; congestion; GPS-tracking;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
    • H31 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Household
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
    • Q52 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming
    • R41 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Transportation: Demand, Supply, and Congestion; Travel Time; Safety and Accidents; Transportation Noise
    • R48 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Transportation Economics - - - Government Pricing and Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11871. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.