How consumers might switch from gasoline and diesel to alternative energy sources is not known, since the availability of alternatives is currently very limited. To bridge this gap, we exploit exogenous variation in ethanol prices at Brazil's pumps and uncover substantial consumer heterogeneity...

Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a home-grown ubiquitously-retailed alternative to fossil fuels in light road transportation: ethanol from sugar cane. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the uptake of flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) has been tremendous. Five years after their...

How motorists might switch from gasoline and diesel to alternative energy sources is not known, since the availability of alternatives is currently very limited. To bridge this gap, we exploit recent exogenous variation in ethanol prices at Brazil's pumps and uncover substantial consumer...

The purchase of multifuel vehicles (MFVs) has been incentivized by policies across the globe. Such vehicles are able to operate on more than one source of energy, so they introduce fuel (or energy) choice as one additional dimension consumers decide about. As fuels differ in terms of carbon...

It has been proposed that lower NOx emission fuels such as ethanol can mitigate air pollution from vehicles burning oil-based hydrocarbons. Yet, existing modeling and laboratory studies, even those seeking to simulate the same environment, vary in their predictions of how gasoline/ethanol blends...

We examine four discontinuities in the ethanol content in blended gasoline fuel, mandated by Brazil's central government over the period 2010 to 2013, to test the joint hypotheses that (1) atmospheric ozone production in the São Paulo metropolitan area is limited by the volume and reactivity of...

Despite ethanol's penetration into urban transportation, observational evidence quantifying the consequence for the atmospheric particulate burden during actual, not hypothetical, fuel-fleet shifts, has been lacking. Here we analyze aerosol, meteorological, traffic, and consumer behavior data...