top of page
043A6522.jpg

Research

Working Papers

Big Push Policies and Network Externalities: Insights from Quebec's EV Fast-Charging Market,
Cordeau, Hugo. 2026

Industries with strong complementarities and network externalities may exhibit multiple equilibria. I examine whether direct government provision of network infrastructure can remedy this inefficiency. Using car registration and charging transaction data from 2017–2023, I estimate a structural model of vehicle demand and charging behavior, where consumers choose an EV and derive utility from undertaking OD trips given the charging network topology. I decompose the Big Push into two components: a coordination effect and an externality effect. I find that the coordination effect — shifting the economy from the low Nash-Equilibrium to the high one — increases EV adoption by 140 %, while the externality effect raises adoption by a compounding 50 %. The latter arises from placing chargers at critical connector nodes that would otherwise be privately unprofitable. As the network grows from 300 to 1,000 stations, government provision crowds in private investment in the core while crowding it out at the periphery. Overall, the policy is highly effective, generating $11 billion in consumer value and $2,7 billion in climate benefits from a $185 million investment. This paper provides the first empirical evidence that direct public provision of network infrastructure can resolve coordination failures.

The Causal Impact of On-Street Charging Stations on EV Adoption,
Cordeau, Hugo. 2026

I am developing a project that studies whether the provision of on-street public charging stations increases EV adoption. I use transaction-level charging data covering the near-universe of public charging station usage to construct two datasets: the EV fleet at the ZIP-code level and on-street charging station deployment across dissemination areas (smaller than census tracts), allowing me to link localized charging access to neighborhood-level EV adoption. The empirical strategy exploits quasi-experimental variation in the rollout of on-street chargers across space and time, using difference-in-differences and event-study designs with rich fixed effects to isolate the causal impact of local charging availability. Data construction and spatial matching are complete, and baseline models are implemented; preliminary results suggest that one additional charger leads to approximately 1.1 additional EVs in the following year. Next steps entail implementing a 2SLS identification strategy and conducting counterfactual analysis to improve the placement of chargers.

The Impact of Violent Crimes on Commuting: Evidence from Toronto, with William Arbour. 2025

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, violent crime has increased while public transit usage has declined. We study whether these trends are causally related using administrative ridership data from the Toronto Transit Commission, web-scraped crime reports from CP24 News, and trip records from Uber and Lyft. Using an event-study framework, we show that commuters respond sharply to salient violent incidents — sexual assaults and homicides — leading to a 3% decline in transit ridership within five days of an event. Ridership gradually returns to baseline, despite no detectable change in underlying crime risk.

Leveraging the roll-out of Montréal’s protected Express Biking Network and bikeshare data, I estimate that new lanes increase ridership by about 30 percent within 300 meters, declining to about 20 percent within 500 meters. This effect is driven by higher speeds and longer trips. Nearby lanes experience positive spillovers, suggesting new cyclists rather than displacement. A triple-differences strategy using seasonal variation finds little to no substitution away from the subway network, while descriptive evidence points to a reduction in car use.

Publication

Waldinger (2022) finds a positive relationship between temperature and city size during the climate change of 1600-1850. We show the main result differs by city size. Cities with less than 1000 inhabitants (which make up 23.5% of observations and are 49.6% of cities at some point) exhibit a strong and positive relationship between temperature and city size, whereas cities with always more than 1000 inhabitants exhibit a negative relationship. Further examination of the underlying city size data, which bins populations into coarse thousand-wide population intervals, finds the original analysis to be robust to a number of reasonable alternative researcher choices.

bottom of page