Search Results
Working Paper
Charged and Almost Ready—What Is Holding Back the Resale Market for Battery Electric Vehicles?
We utilize vehicle registration microdata for all new and used vehicles registered in the U.S. for model years 2010-2022 to study the market for used battery electric vehicles (BEVs). From these records, we establish two stylized facts: 1) BEVs enter the used market at the slowest rate compared to any other powertrain technology, and 2) BEVs are driven significantly less than vehicles featuring other powertrain technologies. We connect these facts through a statistical model of used vehicle registration counts and find that there are significant behavioral differences between BEV and other ...
U.S. battery industry cuts losses, shifts to new ventures amid EV bust
With demand for electric vehicles failing to meet ambitious projections, automakers, battery companies and utilities are reassessing how best to deploy battery power.
Working Paper
If You Build It, They May Not Come: Willingness to Participate in Managed EV Charging
Despite the importance of program participation for policy, treatment effects are often measured on self-selected samples. We study electric vehicle (EV) managed charging, intended to reduce electric grid strain by optimally allocating charging across EVs. Prior work finds large impacts of managed charging among households who volunteer for an RCT. In contrast, we test managed charging with an experiment including all EVs within a California utility. Enrollment is low even with high incentives, and we can reject even modest intent-to-treat effects on electricity consumption. Managed charging ...
Discussion Paper
Will Peak Demand Roil Global Oil Markets?
“Peak oil”—the notion that the depletion of accessible petroleum deposits would soon lead to declining global oil output and an upward trend in prices—was widely debated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Proponents of the peak supply thesis turned out to be wrong, given the introduction of fracking and other new extraction methods. Now the notion of peak oil is back, but in reverse form, with global demand set to flatten and then fade amid growing use of EVs and other low-carbon technologies. The arrival of “peak demand” would turn global oil markets into a zero-sum game: Supply ...
Working Paper
Investing in the Batteries and Vehicles of the Future: A View Through the Stock Market
A large number of companies operating in the EV and battery supply chain have listed on a U.S. stock exchange in recent years. I compile a unique data set of high-frequency stock returns for those companies and investigate the extent to which an “industry” factor specific to the EV and battery supply chain (an “EV” factor) can explain their returns. Those returns are decomposed into systematic and idiosyncratic components, with the former given by a set of latent factors extracted from a large panel of stock returns using high-frequency principal components. It is found that a market ...
Discussion Paper
China’s Electric Trade
China has spent considerable government resources to develop advanced electric technology industries, such as those that produce electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels. These efforts have spilled over to international trade as improvements in price and quality have increased the global demand for these goods. One consequence is that passenger cars and batteries have been disproportionately large contributors to the rise in the country’s trade surplus in recent years. This has not been the case, though, for solar panels, as falling prices due to a supply glut pulled down ...
Working Paper
Investing in the Batteries and Vehicles of the Future: A View Through the Stock Market
A large number of companies operating in the EV and battery supply chain have listed on a major U.S. stock exchange in recent years. This paper investigates 1) how these companies’ stock returns are related to systematic risk factors that can explain movements in the stock market and 2) how these companies’ idiosyncratic returns are related to one another. To do so, I compile a unique data set of intradaily stock returns that spans the supply chain, including companies focused on the mining of battery and EV-related critical minerals, advanced battery technology, lithium-ion battery ...
Journal Article
Old oil fields reimagined as lithium sources
The Smackover Formation, extending broadly from East Texas to Florida, is ground zero in the effort to produce lithium from oilfield brines.