UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Andrew Waxman, assistant professor of economics and public policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, will give the talk, “Paying at the Pump and the Ballot Box: Electoral Penalties of Motor Fuels Taxes” at noon on Wednesday, April 23, in 157 Hosler Building on the University Park campus.
“Perhaps the greatest challenge to addressing climate change comprehensively through government policy in the United States has been limited political feasibility,” said Waxman.
In his talk, Waxman will discuss a comprehensive dataset he compiled on state legislative election outcomes and gasoline taxes to investigate whether politicians are punished by voters for increasing motor fuel taxes. Leveraging a difference-in-discontinuities research design, he estimates the effect of legislated gasoline tax changes on incumbent state legislators' subsequent electoral outcomes. For very close elections, he shows how the incumbency advantage attenuates when gasoline tax increases have been legislated in the intervening legislative session. Specifically, he finds a small, but economically and statistically meaningful decrease in the incumbency advantage of 1.3 to 1.9 percentage points for Republican and Democratic incumbents, respectively.
“This penalty represents 14 to 21% of the overall electoral advantage of incumbents in our sample, which highlights the relative importance of environmental and energy taxes in voter priorities,” Waxman said.
Waxman is an applied microeconomist who examines the relationship between environmental outcomes, urban policies and inequality. Much of his work consists in trying to think about how household location decisions of place of work and residence have implications for levels of emissions from home electricity usage as well as from commuting using personal vehicles. The link between these sectors has important implications for the design of cities and for understanding the full effects of policies targeting housing or transportation.
Waxman earned his B.A. in economics from Stanford University, his M.S. in economics from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. in applied economics and management from Cornell University.
The Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI) was established in 2011 with the goal of promoting policy-relevant economics research that lies at the boundary between economic sciences and the study of natural or engineered systems. The EEEPI initiative is focused primarily on the union between energy systems and environmental management and the development of quantitative tools to address decision challenges in these areas. View more information on EEEPI.