Addiction to car use and dynamic elasticity measures in France

This article presents a microeconometric analysis of the annual mileage travelled by French households with their personal cars, defining their automobility. To feature car use dependence, the rational addiction model of Becker et al. (1994) is applied on a panel dataset, drawn from the French "Car Fleet" survey over the period 1999-2001. Importantly, the estimates show that the assumption of addiction to car use cannot be rejected. Furthermore, the model yields realistic kilometric-price and income elasticities of household automobility, for both the short and the long runs.