Fuel Efficiency and Motor Vehicle Travel: The Declining Rebound Effect

By Kenneth Small, K. van Dender. Controlling Automobile Air Pollution, 2007

505 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate the rebound effect for motor vehicles, by which improved fuel efficiency causes additional travel, using a pooled cross section of US states for 1966-2001. Our model accounts for endogenous changes in fuel efficiency, distinguishes between autocorrelation and lagged effects, includes a measure of the stringency of fuel-economy standards, and allows the rebound effect to vary with income, urbanization, and the fuel cost of driving. At sample averages of variables, our simultaneous-equations estimates of the short- and long-run rebound effect are 4.5% and 22.2%. But rising real income caused it to diminish substantially over the period, aided by falling fuel prices. With variables at 1997-2001 levels, our estimates are only 2.2% and 10.7%, considerably smaller than values typically assumed for policy analysis. With income and starting fuel efficiency at 1997-2001 levels and fuel prices 58 percent higher, the estimates are still only 3.1% and 15.3%, respectively.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1c6b028f940d3645d9acc5ca5e2e8355b1c00e8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

In Environmental Engineering

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound (2019, methodology): “The empirical investigation of micro-level rebound usually utilizes regression-based approaches with cross-sectional, time series, or panel data [14,19].”
Dilemma between economic development and energy conservation: Energy rebound effect in China☆ (2012, methodology): “Energy rebound effect of different levels (for example, at national, regional, or household levels) is estimated [24,6,16].”
A new approach to measuring the rebound effect associated to energy efficiency improvements: An application to the US residential energy demand (2015, background): “Sorrell and Dimitropoulos (2007) find that for household heating the rebound effect usually ranges from 10 to 58% in the short-term and from 1.”
The Rebound Effect and Energy Efficiency Policy (2016, background): “In a review of the older literature, Sorrell (2007) finds wide ranges for most residential energy services.”
The foundations of the environmental rebound effect and its contribution towards a general framework (2016, methodology): “This approach has been used by different disciplines to study time-278 efficient technological changes, especially in the transport sector, for instance regarding increased 279 road capacity and traffic management systems (Hymel et al., 2010; Small and Van Dender, 2007).”