Improving Equitable Electric Vehicle Adoption

Subsidies for pro-social behaviors—such as adopting electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, or other decarbonization technologies—are frequently criticized for being non-additional and regressive. Higher-income households tend to claim subsidies they would have used anyway, while lower-income households often remain constrained by financial, informational, and behavioral barriers. To design more equitable and cost-effective programs, policymakers require evidence not only on how many low- and moderate-income (LMI) households would adopt these technologies at different subsidy levels, but also on how the structure and salience of subsidy offers affect purchase intent, uptake, and the distribution of benefits.  We partner with an electric utility and car dealerships to implement a large-scale, two-stage randomized evaluations across approximately 100,000 LMI households to address these gaps. Combining surveys, negotiated vehicle prices, and vehicle registration records, the study will provide policymakers with experimentally estimated demand curves for EV subsidies among LMI households, evidence on behavioral responses to alternative incentive structures, and the first experimental measures of dealer pass-through in EV subsidy programs.