Raúl Bajo-Buenestado

Effects of Exogenous Tax Changes

In a recent study in the Economic Journal, Raúl Bajo-Buenestado explores the differential effect on the tax pass-through onto final prices that occurs when firms have different types of vertical contracts. To explore this research question, he uses daily gas station-level data from Spain and shows how an exogenous tax change differentially affects gas stations that are vertically integrated with a refiner and those that are controlled by an independent third party.

Mr. Bajo-Buenestado expertise lies at the intersection of energy and environmental economics, industrial organization, and regulation and competition policy. While visiting CESifo, he will develop and work on two of his main ongoing projects. The first deals with the economics of electric and hybrid vehicles. This topic is of particular importance in Europe, as there are several European countries in which the uptake of these vehicles is relatively low among household and professional drivers. Using transaction-level data from taxi drivers in Spain between 2014 and 2020, he documents that one of the reasons that explains the relatively low uptake of green vehicles is precisely the lack of competition in this industry; additional competition has thus the potential of increasing the effectiveness of the so-called “green policies.”

In his second project, he explores the impact of the current European energy crisis on national electricity markets within the EU. Here he estimates the pass-through of the unprecedented surge in natural gas prices on wholesale electricity prices in nearly all power markets in Europe using hourly-level data.

Raúl Bajo-Buenestado is an Associate professor at the University of Navarra’s Economics Department. He is also a nonresident scholar at the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies (Rice University), and a research fellow at the Navarra Center for International Development (Institute for Culture and Society). He received a Fulbright scholarship from 2012 to 2014 as a graduate student and obtained his PhD in Economics in 2016 from Rice University. Currently, he serves as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade.