Perhaps the greatest challenge to addressing climate change comprehensively through government policy in the U.S. has been limited political feasibility. We investigate whether politicians are punished by voters for increasing motor fuel taxes by compiling a comprehensive dataset on state legislative election outcomes and gasoline taxes. Leveraging a difference-in-discontinuities research design, we estimate the effect of legislated gasoline tax changes on incumbent state legislators' subsequent electoral outcomes. For very close elections, we show how the incumbency advantage attenuates when gasoline tax increases have been legislated in the intervening legislative session. Specifically, we find a small, but economically and statistically meaningful decrease in the incumbency advantage of 1.3 to 1.9 percentage points for Republican and Democratic incumbents, respectively. This penalty represents 14-21% of the overall electoral advantage of incumbents in our sample, which highlights the relative importance of environmental and energy taxes in voter priorities.

Public transport is central to commuting in most cities. This paper studies the role of public transportation in shaping the urban structure. Its main contribution is to propose a tractable model as a tool to study urban regulations and transport policies in the long-run. Using the classic monocentric city framework, we model public transport as a mode that can only be accessed by walking to a set of stops. By incorporating a discrete transport mode choice and income heterogeneity, the model remains simple yet can reproduce non-monotonous urban gradients observed in cities with public transport, and well-observed spatial patterns of sorting by income and use of public transport. For example, it can reproduce an inverted U-shape of transit usage along the city. To highlight the relevance of the model, we study the effects of pricing pollution externalities together with extending the public transportation network on the urban structure.