Addiction to car use and dynamic elasticity measures in France

Roger Collet (1) , Mathieu de Lapparent (1) , Laurent Hivert (1)

1 INRETS/DEST - Département Economie et Sociologie des Transports

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.

Mots clés: Transportation; Car use; Consumption; Addiction; Panel; GMM

Domaines: Economies et finances

Roger Collet, Mathieu de Lapparent, Laurent Hivert. Addiction to car use and dynamic elasticity measures in France. 12th World Conference on Transport Research, Jul 2010, Lisbonne, Portugal. 10p. ⟨hal-00614966⟩