How do consumers react to an increase in gasoline taxes? How much will they drive less? Will they buy more fuel efficient cars? Do tax increases have a stronger impact than gasoline price increases from other sources, like higher oil prices?

In their very interesting article Gasoline Taxes and Consumer Behavior (AEJ Policy, 2014) Shanjun Li, Joshua Linn and Erich Muehlegger study these questions for the US. They go even further and use news data to study in how far higher media coverage is one reason for tax increases to have a higher impact on consumer behavior than price increases from other sources.

As part of her Master Thesis at Ulm University, Melina Klenk has created a very nice RTutor problem set that allows you to replicate key findings of this analysis in an interactive fashion.

Here is one of the many plots that you will generate when working through the problem set:

You can test the problem set online on shinyapps.io

https://melina-kle.shinyapps.io/RTutorGasolineTaxes

or locally install the problem set, by following the installation guide at the problem set’s Github repository:

https://github.com/melinakle/RTutorGasolineTaxes

If you want to learn more about RTutor, try out other problem sets, or create a problem set yourself, take a look at the Github page

https://github.com/skranz/RTutor

or at the documentation

https://skranz.github.io/RTutor