Co-auteurs : Ariane Bousquet (Renault et Université d’Evry) et Maria-Eugenia Sanin (Université d’Evry)

Résumé : Fuel taxes being very unpopular, most environmental policies in the automobile sector consists in subsidies, standards, or feebates. A major drawback to the effectiveness of such policies is that they only affect new cars. However, the interaction between first-hand and second-hand markets has not been documented yet. This paper investigates how environmental taxes on new cars affect prices in the used-car market. Focusing on the French feebate on new vehicles, I use a unique data set from the leading French car-selling platform. I find a statistically significant effect of taxes on the prices of used cars. This pass-through to used car prices fades after one to two years. On the contrary, I do not find any effect of subsidies on low-emission vehicles on used car prices. These results indicate that sellers of relatively young polluting cars manage to pass the taxes they paid at registration to buyers in the used car markets. They also indicate that subsidies do not significantly decrease prices in second-hand markets. More generally, these preliminary findings bring new perspectives to the evaluation of the effectiveness and distributive effects of environmental policies in the automobile sector.