Greening Vehicle Fleets: A structural analysis of scrappage programs during the financial crisis

Vehicle scrappage programs (SPs) have been a common policy tool to replace aged and/or fuel-inefficient vehicles with fuel-efficient ones, recently adopted to make national vehicle fleets greener. This study evaluates the impacts of the SPs by examining the Japanese private passenger vehicle market in which the government allocated the second-largest program expenditure during the financial crisis. The evaluation is conducted based on the structural model of oligopolistic competition in the presence of the SP, which is estimated using market-level sales, price, and attribute data for each car model from FY2006 to FY2009. To conduct the structural analysis, this study develops a simple method to estimate the demand side in the presence of the SP, which incorporates data on aggregate program outcomes such as the program expenditure in the estimation of the discrete choice models. Given the estimates of the structural model, I simulate counterfactual outcomes under alternative SP designs and discuss program designs that could cost-effectively improve the environmental quality of vehicle fleets, considering the welfare and fiscal stimulus impacts.