Flight ticket taxes in Europe: Environmental and economic impact

Abstract

We examine the causal impact of flight ticket taxes on airline flights and derived CO2 emissions and analyse its distributional effects between airlines and travellers and within travellers. We use a dataset on flights within Europe at the airline-route level and apply a staggered difference-in-differences approach considering potential bias of the standard two-way fixed effects and the potential distorting effects of heterogeneities between treated and control routes. The main analysis focuses on low-cost airlines because connecting passengers are typically excluded from the tax. We find that flight ticket taxes have a significant overall effect on low-costs airlines supply and derived emissions: ticket taxes reduce the number of flights per airline-route by 12% on average compared to the counterfactual scenario, resulting in a 14% reduction in carbon emissions. In addition, we estimate a pricing equation using a quantile model to identify the cost pass-through rate over the distribution of the fare variable. The burden of the tax is higher for passengers paying low fares, so taxes have a stronger effect on avoidable flights with less added value and a smaller internalization of the total costs of flying.