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...

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...

As much of the world goes searching for alternative sources of energy to oil, Brazil's three-decade experience in developing a successful substitute for gasoline merits attention. Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a ubiquitously distributed alternative to oil-based...

Among Brazil's gasoline-ethanol vehicle users, it is common to observe the purchase of the fuel that yields the less miles per dollar of spending. In a large-scale set of experiments with 10,400 subjects, I inform energy consumers at the pump of the effective price difference across fuels. The...