Research

Does access to high-speed rail (HSR) accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs)? We use the staggered expansion of Spain's HSR network from 2015 to 2025 as a quasi-experiment to estimate the causal effect of HSR connectivity on municipal-level EV adoption. Using vehicle-level registration microdata, we construct an annual panel of the 7,975 mainland Spanish municipalities and define a municipality as treated once it lies within 25 kilometers of an operating station. Implementing staggered difference-in-differences (DID) and Callaway and Sant'Anna DID (CSDID) estimators on a Mahalanobis-matched sample of comparable municipalities, we find that HSR connection raises the battery electric vehicle (BEV) share of new registrations by about 0.9 to 1.3 percentage points, an economically meaningful effect against a national increase of roughly 10 percentage points over the decade. The effect remains robust when controlling for local charging infrastructure and purchase subsidies, and a least-cost instrumental variable design supports the causal relationship. The findings suggest that HSR access alleviates consumers' range anxiety about EVs by providing a substitute for long-distance travel, identifying the transport network as a vital complement to the electric transition.