Public charging infrastructure and the market diffusion of electric vehicles

•We examine the nexus between public charging infrastructure and EV registrations.•The long-run relationship is estimated by a dynamic heterogeneous panel approach.•Different charging infrastructure measures have varying effects on EV registrations.•We find indications of a positive causal long-run relationship but on a low scale.•EV consumers respond more to charging speed and less to the number of chargers. A comprehensive roll-out of public charging infrastructure will be costly. However, its impact on the diffusion of electric vehicles (EVs) is not clear. Our study aims at estimating the extent to which an increasing availability of public charging infrastructure promotes consumers decisions to switch to EVs. We make use of a German data set including monthly registrations of new cars at the ZIP-code level between 2012 and 2017 and match it with the official registry of charging stations. We measure charging infrastructure by its quantity, capacity and abundance in order to estimate its impact on EV adoption. A dynamic heterogeneous panel approach is deployed in order to identify the structural long-run relationship between charging infrastructure and monthly EV registrations. We find evidence of a positive long-run relationship (and also of a causal link) but on a rather low scale. We conclude that consumers do not necessarily react to the mere number of public chargers but attach more importance to charging speed and are to a large extent influenced by unobservable common factors.