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.

全面部署公共收费基础设施的成本很高。但是，其对电动汽车（EV）扩散的影响尚不清楚。我们的研究旨在估算公共收费基础设施可用性的提高在多大程度上促进了消费者转向电动汽车的决策。我们使用了德国数据集，其中包括2012年至2017年之间邮政编码区域的新车月度注册，并将其与充电站的官方注册表进行了匹配。我们衡量其充电基础设施的数量，能力和丰富为了评估其对电动汽车采用的影响。为了确定充电基础设施和每月电动汽车注册之间的长期结构关系，采用了动态异构小组方法。我们发现长期合作关系积极（也有因果关系）的证据，但规模很小。我们得出的结论是，消费者并不一定会对仅有的几种公共充电器做出反应，而是会更加重视充电速度，并且在很大程度上受到不可观察的共同因素的影响。