Price Pass-Through of Austria’s Single-Use Plastics Producer Charges: Evidence from Retail Offer Spells

Single-use plastics (SUPs) impose substantial environmental costs. Following Directive (EU) 2019/904, Austria introduced producer charges and mandatory participation in collection and recycling systems. This thesis exploits a monthly aggregated and disaggregated panel of retail offer spells drawn from a price-comparison platform to estimate the extent to which compliance costs pass through to posted online prices in Austria. The treated sample comprises keyword-matched SUP products—balloons, to-go cups, wet wipes, plastic bags, food containers, tobacco-filter items, beverage bottles, and plastic wraps—observed alongside a control group of non-SUP listings over 2020–2024. A two-way fixed-effects (TWFE) specification places the average post-treatment price increase at approximately 4.1 percent. A sequential TWFE model that disaggregates the administrative reporting phase (from March 2023) from the payment-due phase (from March 2024) reveals that the larger adjustment occurs during the earlier reporting stage, with a reporting-only effect of approximately 8.1 percent and an incremental payment-phase effect of 5.6 percent. For balloons—a category subject to pronounced regulatory fee exposure— event-study estimates exceed 50 percent in the months immediately following the initial payment date and remain elevated throughout most of the post-treatment window. Taken together, these findings indicate that Austrian online retailers began adjusting prices in advance of fee payment deadlines, a pattern consistent with anticipatory pass-through of expected compliance costs rather than a discrete response to realized payments. As the data contain price observations but not quantity data, the analysis speaks to price incidence and does not extend to consumption or environmental outcomes.