the empirical analysis of the determinants for environmental technological change a research agenda abstract technological change is usually considered a necessary albeit not sufficient condition for a transition to sustainability however the empirical analysis of the determinants to environmental technological change has not received too much attention in the environmental ecological economics literature and many open questions remain in this context based on a careful review of the literature this paper argues that further analysis should address several issues at different levels i e regarding the conceptual framework the thematic scope of the studies some methodological issues and other aspects related to the environmental policy variable first an integrated conceptual framework which takes into account the interplay between relevant variables influencing environmental technological change i e factors internal and external to the firm and characteristics of the environmental technologies and all the stages of this process with a greater emphasis on the invention stage should be developed other aspects should then be tackled including a focus on several themes i e a greater attention to cross sectoral technologies the barriers to different types of environmental technologies the international dimension of environmental technological change and environmental technological change in small and medium size enterprises methodological issues combination of case studies and econometric modelling and several issues related to the environmental policy variable

observable and unobservable determinants of replacement of home appliances despite the dominant role of replacement purchases in many consumer durable categories the research in this area has not been extensive only in the last few years has the economic theory made progress towards a more rigorous analysis of the dynamic nature involved in replacement decisions as a consequence of this applied researchers have switched from conventional discrete choice models to new econometric techniques e g duration analysis that allow for richer relationships between socioeconomic variables characteristics of the durable good and the likelihood of its replacement over time our study focuses on two home appliances taken from the residential energy consumption survey recs based on a duration model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity across households we conclude that household demographics and product features both observable and unobservable in general have statistical power to explain replacement decisions over time

the importance of comprehensiveness in renewable electricity and energy efficiency policy based on extensive research interviews and supplemented with a review of the academic literature this article assesses the best way to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency it begins by briefly laying out why government intervention is needed and then details the four most favored policy mechanisms identified by participants eliminating subsidies for conventional and mature electricity technologies pricing electricity accurately passing a national feed in tariff and implementing a nationwide systems benefit fund to raise public awareness protect lower income households and administer demand side management programs drawing mostly from case studies in the united states the article also discusses why these policy mechanisms must be implemented comprehensively not individually if the barriers to renewables and energy efficiency are to be overcome

utility rebates for energy star appliances are they effective we estimate the impact of utility cash rebates on the market share of energy star appliances by exploiting the variation in timing and size of rebates across us states we find that a dollar increase in the population weighted utility rebate raises the share of energy star qualified clothes washers by 0 4 but does not affect dishwasher and refrigerator shares using information on energy saved by an energy star appliance and assuming a redemption rate of 40 the cost per tonne of carbon saved is about 140 for the clothes washers rebate program the corresponding cost of a megawatt hour saved about 28 is lower than the estimated cost of building and operating an additional power plant and the average on peak spot price we conclude that the energy star clothes washers rebate program is on average a cost effective way for utilities to reduce electricity demand

energy conservation more effective with rebound policy this article sketches the problem of indirect energy use effects also known as rebound of energy conservation there is widespread support for energy conservation especially when it is voluntary as this seems a cheap way to realize environmental and energy climate goals however this overlooks the phenomenon of rebound the topic of energy rebound has mainly attracted attention from energy analysts but has been surprisingly neglected in environmental economics even though economists generally are concerned with indirect or economy wide impacts of technical change and policies this paper presents definitions and interpretations of energy and environmental rebound as well as four fundamental reasons for the existence of the rebound phenomenon it further offers the most complete list of rebound pathways or mechanisms available in the literature in addition it discusses empirical estimates of rebound and addresses the implications of uncertainties and difficulties in assessing rebound suggestions are offered for strategies and public policies to contain rebound it is advised that rebound evaluation is an essential part of environmental policy and project assessments as opposed to earlier studies this paper stresses the relevance of the distinction between energy conservation resulting from autonomous demand changes and from efficiency improvements in technology equipment in addition it argues that rebound is especially relevant for developing countries

why shops close again an evolutionary perspective on the deregulation of shopping hours this paper introduces a new perspective on the deregulation of shopping hours based on ideas from evolutionary game theory we study a retail economy where shopping hours have been deregulated recently it is argued that first the deregulation leads to a coordination problem between store owners and customers and second the solution to this problem depends on the specific cost structure of stores and the preferences of customers in particular it may happen that even if extended shopping hours are pareto efficient stores and customers do not succeed in coordinating on this equilibrium the analysis explains the observation in germany where shopping hours have been deregulated recently that store owners tend to go back to the former shopping hours again moreover it emphasizes the important role of advertisement campaigns as a signalling device

two stage residual inclusion estimation addressing endogeneity in health econometric modeling the paper focuses on two estimation methods that have been widely used to address endogeneity in empirical research in health economics and health services research two stage predictor substitution 2sps and two stage residual inclusion 2sri 2sps is the rote extension to nonlinear models of the popular linear two stage least squares estimator the 2sri estimator is similar except that in the second stage regression the endogenous variables are not replaced by first stage predictors instead first stage residuals are included as additional regressors in a generic parametric framework we show that 2sri is consistent and 2sps is not results from a simulation study and an illustrative example also recommend against 2sps and favor 2sri our findings are important given that there are many prominent examples of the application of inconsistent 2sps in the recent literature this study can be used as a guide by future researchers in health economics who are confronted with endogeneity in their empirical work

technology invention and diffusion in residential energy consumption a stochastic frontier approach traditional large appliances absorb a large share of residential electricity consumption and represent important targets of energy policy strategies aimed at achieving energy security despite being characterized by rather mature technologies this group of appliances still offers large potential in terms of efficiency gains due to their pervasive diffusion in this paper we analyse the electricity consumption of a set of four traditional white goods in a panel of ten eu countries observed over 21 years 1990 2010 with the aim of disentangling the amount of technical efficiency from the overall energy saving the technical efficiency trend is modelled through a set of technology components representing both the invention and adoption process by the means of specific patents weighted by production and bilateral import flows which allows to overcome the rigid stochastic frontier framework in modelling the effect of technical change our results show that the derived energy demand and inefficiency trends are both related to changes in the amount of available technology embodied in energy efficient appliances the effect is significant both in its domestic and international components and suggests an active role of innovation and trade policies for achieving efficiency targets which directly impact the amount of electricity consumed by households

some economics of trade secret law despite the practical importance of trade secrets to the business community the law of trade secrets is a neglected orphan in economic analysis this paper sketches an approach to the economics of trade secret law that connects it more closely both to other areas of intellectual property and to broader issues in the positive economic theory of the common law

the implications of the historical decline in us energy intensity for long run co2 emission projections this paper analyzes the influence of the long run decline in us energy intensity on projections of energy use and carbon emissions to the year 2050 we build on our own recent work which decomposes changes in the aggregate us energy gdp ratio into shifts in sectoral composition structural change and adjustments in the energy demand of individual industries intensity change and identifies the impact on the latter of price induced substitution of variable inputs shifts in the composition of capital and embodied and disembodied technical progress we employ a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium cge model of the us economy to analyze the implications of these findings for future energy use and carbon emissions comparison of the simulation results against projections of historical trends in gdp energy use and emissions reveals that the range of values for the rate of autonomous energy efficiency improvement aeei conventionally used in cge models is consistent with the effects of structural changes at the sub sector level rather than disembodied technological change even so our results suggest that us emissions may well grow faster in the future than in the recent past

modeling international trends in energy efficiency article i nfo article history i use a stochastic production frontier to model energy ef ciency trends in 85 countries over a 37 year period differences in energy ef ciency across countries are modeled as a stochastic function of explanatory variables and i estimate the model using the cross section of time averaged data so that no structure is imposed on technological change over time energy ef ciency is measured using a new energy distance function ap proach the country using the least energy per unit output given its mix of outputs and inputs de nes the global production frontier a country s relative energy ef ciency is given by its distance from the frontier the ratio of its actual energy use to the minimum required energy use ceteris paribus energy ef ciency is higher in countries with inter alia higher total factor productivity undervalued currencies and smaller fossil fuel reserves and it converges over time across countries globally technological change was the most impor tant factor counteracting the energy use and carbon emissions increasing effects of economic growth

shopping hours and price levels in the retailing industry a theoretical and empirical analysis i introduction the debate surrounding shopping laws is very much the same regardless of the country in which it occurs the traditional objectives of regulating store opening hours can be divided into four categories i to guarantee access to essential goods and services ii to promote and protect a certain way of life iii to protect small businesses and iv to assure a day of rest for everyone despite these concerns the recent trend in canadian provinces is to extend store opening hours in the retailing industry for instance in july 1990 the quebec government allowed retail stores to stay open on wednesday nights and on sundays the recent deregulation was prompted by changes in lifestyles and increasing constraints on the time people can devote to shopping activities perhaps the most significant are that the number of one parent families is increasing as is the number of couples in which both spouses work there is evidence that changes in opening hours influence the structure of the retailing industry morrison and newman 1983 show that there is a redistribution of sales from small stores to large stores after deregulation an empirical study by moorehouse 1984 shows that in the united states those states that strictly regulate store opening hours do have a smaller proportion of large stores building on their work we examine the short term impact of extended shopping hours on prices at large stores to determine whether consumers have to pay higher prices for greater shopping flexibility to our knowledge this issue has not been addressed in the literature first we develop an extension of morrison and newman s 1983 theoretical model inspired by becker 1965 and location models pioneered by hotelling 1929 chamberlin 1951 1962 lancaster 1966 and salop 1977 we deem the price of a good to have two components the price itself and the time spent by the consumer to purchase the good thus opening hours and store location play a role in the determination of prices we explore the effect of increased opening hours on the demand faced by stores of different sizes and thus on their price levels among other things our model predicts that after deregulation price levels at large stores will increase because of a demand shift in favor of large stores at the expense of small stores we then test this prediction using pooled time series and cross section data prices of five products for thirty one weeks collected before and after the deregulation of store hours in quebec on july 8 1990 the data were collected at three major food stores in the montreal area we obtain estimates of price equations using the pooling method developed by kmenta 1986 the results support our view that prices have increased at large stores since the deregulation the rest of the paper is organized as follows in section ii we develop our analytical framework section iii presents the data and the estimation strategy since a price increase may signal an increase in costs rather than an increase in demand we deal explicitly with this issue in that section of the paper we discuss the empirical results in section iv and we conclude in section v ii the model the following analysis extends that of morrison and newman 1983 a brief initial overview of their work is needed to develop the necessary notation and to set up the problem in their model morrison and newman make two simplifying yet standard assumptions they assume a single perfectly divisible homogeneous commodity and only two types of stores large and small thus consumers choose to shop at small or large stores to minimize the total cost tc of purchasing the commodity on a given shopping trip the total cost includes the cost of the bundle of goods p sub j b where p sub j is the price per unit at store j and b is the bundle size a consumer intends to buy and his own valuation of the time needed to travel to the store a

investment inefficiency and the adoption of eco innovations the case of household energy efficiency technologies abstract this paper examines the factors determining household adoption of energy efficiency eco innovations we do so by testing hypotheses grounded in diffusion and finance theory and the literature on the barriers to energy efficiency using two large surveys of uk households we explore the adoption of nine technologies our results indicate investment inefficiency amongst household adopters occurs for two reasons first contrary to notions of rational choice we find a negative relationship between the investment return of technologies and their level of diffusion second we show adopters of these technologies display characteristics broadly consistent with diffusion theory contradicting the prediction of finance theory that investment return not individual characteristics should drive adoption we also find that policy has played a role in inducing the diffusion of these technologies and that tenure and spill over effects are important in adoption finally adoption is motivated more by a desire to save money than by environmental concern we conclude by giving examples of how our research can lead to better policy timing and targeting

improving the energy efficiency of buildings the impact of environmental policy on technological innovation abstract this paper investigates the impact of alternative environmental policy instruments on technological innovations aiming to improve energy efficiency in buildings the empirical analysis focuses on three main types of policy instruments namely regulatory energy standards in buildings codes energy taxes as captured by energy prices and specific governmental energy r d expenditures technological innovation is measured using patent counts for specific technologies related to energy efficiency in buildings e g insulation high efficiency boilers energy saving lightings the estimates for seven european countries over the 1989 2004 period imply that a strengthening of 10 of the minimum insulation standards for walls would increase the likelihood to file additional patents by about 3 in contrast energy prices have no significant effect on the likelihood to patent governmental energy r d support has a small positive significant effect on patenting activities

response of residential electricity demand to price the effect of measurement error abstract in this paper we present an empirical analysis of the residential demand for electricity using annual aggregate data at the state level for 48 us states from 1995 to 2007 earlier literature has examined residential energy consumption at the state level using annual or monthly data focusing on the variation in price elasticities of demand across states or regions but has failed to recognize or address two major issues the first is that when fitting dynamic panel models the lagged consumption term in the right hand side of the demand equation is endogenous this has resulted in potentially inconsistent estimates of the long run price elasticity of demand the second is that energy price is likely mismeasured to address these issues we estimate a dynamic partial adjustment model using the kiviet corrected least square dummy variables lsdv 1995 and the blundell bond 1998 estimators we find that the long term elasticities produced by the blundell bond system gmm methods are largest and that from the bias corrected lsdv are greater than that from the conventional lsdv from an energy policy point of view the results obtained using the blundell bond estimator where we instrument for price imply that a carbon tax or other price based policy may be effective in discouraging residential electricity consumption and hence curbing greenhouse gas emissions in an electricity system mainly based on coal and gas power plants

us residential energy demand and energy efficiency a stochastic demand frontier approach this paper estimates a us frontier residential aggregate energy demand function using panel data for 48 states over the period 1995 to 2007 using stochastic frontier analysis sfa utilizing an econometric energy demand model the in efficiency of each state is modeled and it is argued that this represents a measure of the inefficient use of residential energy in each state i e waste energy this underlying efficiency for the us is therefore observed for each state as well as the relative efficiency across the states moreover the analysis suggests that energy intensity is not necessarily a good indicator of energy efficiency whereas by controlling for a range of economic and other factors the measure of energy efficiency obtained via this approach is this is a novel approach to model residential energy demand and efficiency and it is arguably particularly relevant given current us energy policy discussions related to energy efficiency

what s driving energy efficient appliance label awareness and purchase propensity the eu appliance energy consumption labeling scheme is a key component of efforts to increase the diffusion of energy efficient household appliances in this paper the determinants of consumer knowledge of the energy label for household appliances and the choice of class a energy efficient appliances are jointly estimated using data from a large survey of more than 20 000 german households the results for five major appliances suggest that lack of knowledge of the energy label can generate considerable bias in both estimates of rates of uptake of class a appliances and in estimates of the underlying determinants of choice of class a appliance simulations of the choice to purchase a class a appliance given knowledge of the labeling framework reveal that residence characteristics and in several cases regional electricity prices strongly increase the propensity to purchase a class a appliance but socio economic characteristics have surprisingly little impact on appliance energy class choice

elasticities of electricity demand in urban indian households abstract in the past several electricity demand studies have been published for india based on aggregate macro data at the country or sub national state level since the underlying theory of consumer demand is based on the behaviour of individual agents the use of micro data which reflects individual and household behaviour more closely can shed greater light on the nature of consumer responses in this paper seasonal price and income elasticities of electricity demand in the residential sector of all urban areas of india are estimated for the first time using disaggregate level survey data for about 30 000 households three electricity demand functions have been econometrically estimated using monthly data for the winter monsoon and summer season in order to understand the extent to which factors like income prices household size and other household specific characteristics influence variations observed in individual households electricity demand the results show electricity demand is income and price inelastic in all three seasons and that household demographic and geographical variables are significant in determining electricity demand

living up to expectations estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for uk households this study estimates the combined direct and indirect rebound effects from various types of energy efficiency improvement by uk households in contrast to most studies of this topic we base our estimates on cross price elasticities and therefore capture both the income and substitution effects of energy efficiency improvements our approach involves estimating a household demand model to obtain price and expenditure elasticities of different goods and services utilising a multiregional input output model to estimate the ghg emission intensities of those goods and services combining the two to estimate direct and indirect rebound effects and decomposing those effects to reveal the relative contribution of different mechanisms and commodities we estimate that the total rebound effects are 41 for measures that improve the efficiency of domestic gas use 48 for electricity use and 78 for vehicle fuel use the primary source of this rebound is increased consumption of the cheaper energy service i e direct rebound and this is primarily driven by substitution effects our results suggest that the neglect of substitution effects may have led prior research to underestimate the total rebound effect however we provide a number of caveats to this conclusion as well as indicating priorities for future research

dynamic incentives of environmental regulations the effects of alternative policy instruments on technology diffusion abstract we develop a framework for comparing empirically the effects of alternative environmental policy instruments on the diffusion of new technology market based and command and control approaches can he quantitatively compared by estimating the economic penalty that firms through their actions reveal to be associated with violation of standards in the context of concerns about global climate change we empirically examine the likely effects of pigouvian taxes technology adoption subsidies and technology standards we employ state level data on the diffusion of thermal insulation in new home construction comparing the effects of energy prices insulation cost and building codes

technological change technological catch up and capital deepening relative contributions to growth and convergence we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to 1 technological change shifts in the world production frontier 2 technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and 3 capital accumulation movement along the frontier the world production frontier is constructed using deterministic methods requiring no specification of functional form for the technology nor any assumption about market structure or the absence of market imperfections we analyze the evolution of the cross country distribution of labor productivity in terms of the tripartite decomposition finding that technological change is decidedly nonneutral and that both growth and bipolar international divergence are driven primarily by capital deepening jel o30 o47 d24

a new approach to measuring the rebound effect associated to energy efficiency improvements an application to the us residential energy demand this paper brings attention to the fact that the energy demand frontier model introduced by filippini and hunt 2011 2012 is closely connected to the measurement of the so called rebound effect associated with improvements in energy efficiency in particular we show that their model implicitly imposes a zero rebound effect which contradicts most of the available empirical evidence on this issue we relax this restrictive assumption through the modelling of a rebound effect function that mitigates or intensifies the effect of an efficiency improvement on energy consumption we illustrate our model with an empirical application that aims to estimate a us frontier residential aggregate energy demand function using panel data for 48 states over the period 1995 to 2011 average values of the rebound effect in the range of 56 80 are found therefore policymakers should be aware that most of the expected energy reduction from efficiency improvements may not be achieved

rank stock order and epidemic effects in the diffusion of new process technologies an empirical model in this article we construct a general duration model of technology adoption that incorporates the main factors discussed in different theories of diffusion of new process technologies the model is applied to data on diffusion of cnc in the uk engineering industry although we find strong evidence in support of rank and endogenous learning effects there seems to be little evidence in support of the stock and order effects the main factors affecting the diffusion of cnc are found to be endogenous learning firm size industry growth rates the cost of the technology and expected changes in the cost of the technology

is tullock correct about sunday closing laws the evidence presented in this note suggests that other things equal the imposition of a sunday closing law reduces the number of food stores in a given market this finding directly contradicts tullock s hypothesis about the long run effects of sunday closing laws on investment in food stores by implication the evidence also casts doubt on the appropriateness of using sunday closing laws as an example of a government sanctioned privilege that generates no long run benefits even to those who sought the grant of privilege in the first place but there is little surprise in all this particularly if the real impetus behind blue laws comes not from store keepers seeking higher profit margins but from those of certain religious convictions as the preamble to the arkansas statute says keeping a grocery open on sunday is a temptation to vice p 569 however while tullock s particular illustration may be a poor one his main thesis concerning the transitional gains trap remains a useful insight

firm heterogeneity persistent and transient technical inefficiency a generalized true random effects model this paper considers a panel data stochastic frontier model that disentangles unobserved firm effects firm heterogeneity from persistent time invariant long term and transient time varying short term technical inefficiency the model gives us a four way error component model viz persistent and time varying inefficiency random firm effects and noise we use bayesian methods of inference to provide robust and efficient methods of estimating inefficiency components in this four way error component model monte carlo results are provided to validate its performance we also present results from an empirical application that uses a large panel of us commercial banks

the rebound effect microeconomic definitions limitations and extensions abstract the rebound effect results in part from an increased consumption of energy services following an improvement in the technical efficiency of delivering those services this increased consumption offsets the energy savings that may otherwise be achieved if the rebound effect is sufficiently large it may undermine the rationale for policy measures to encourage energy efficiency the nature and magnitude of the rebound effect is the focus of long running dispute with energy economics this paper brings together previous theoretical work to provide a rigorous definition of the rebound effect to clarify key conceptual issues and to highlight the potential consequences of various assumptions for empirical estimates of the effect the focus is on the direct rebound effect for a single energy service indirect and economy wide rebound effects are not discussed beginning with khazzoom s original definition of the rebound effect we expose the limitations of three simplifying assumptions on which this definition is based first we argue that capital costs form an important part of the total cost of providing energy services and that empirical studies that estimate rebound effects from variations in energy prices are prone to bias second we argue that energy efficiency should be treated as an endogenous variable and that empirical estimates of the rebound effect may need to apply a simultaneous equation model to capture the joint determination of key variables third we explore the implications of the opportunity costs of time in the production of energy services and highlight the consequences for energy use of improved time efficiency the influence of time costs on the rebound effect and the existence of a parallel rebound effect with respect to time each of these considerations serves to highlight the difficulties in obtaining reliable estimates of the rebound effect and the different factors that need to be controlled for we discuss the implications of these findings for econometric studies and argue that several existing studies may overestimate the magnitude of the effect

frontiers in the economics of energy efficiency abstract energy efficiency has become an essential instrument to obtain effective greenhouse gas mitigation and reduced energy dependence this introductory article contextualizes the contributions of the supplemental issue by showing the new setting for energy efficiency economics and policy discussing the role of price instruments to promote energy savings presenting new approaches for energy efficiency policies and placing energy efficiency within a wider energy and environmental framework

smart meter devices and the effect of feedback on residential electricity consumption evidence from a natural experiment in northern ireland abstract using a unique set of data and exploiting a large scale natural experiment we estimate the effect of real time usage information on residential electricity consumption in northern ireland starting in april 2002 the utility replaced prepayment meters with advanced meters that allow the consumer to track usage in real time we rely on this event account for the endogeneity of price and payment plan with consumption through a plan selection correction term and find that the provision of information is associated with a decline in electricity consumption of 11 17 we find that the reduction is robust to different specifications selection bias correction methods and subsamples of the original data the advanced metering program delivers reasonably cost effective reductions in carbon dioxide emissions even under the most conservative usage reduction scenarios

the church versus the mall what happens when religion faces increased secular competition recently economists have begun to consider the causes and consequences of religious participation an unanswered question in this literature is the effect upon individuals of changes in the opportunity cost of religious participation in this paper we identify a policy driven change in the opportunity cost of religious participation based on state laws that prohibit retail activity on sunday known as blue laws many states have repealed these laws in recent years raising the opportunity cost of religious participation we use a variety of data sets to show that when a state repeals its blue laws religious attendance falls and that church donations and spending fall as well these results do not seem to be driven by declines in religiosity prior to the law change nor do we see comparable declines in membership in or giving to nonreligious organizations after a state repeals its laws we then assess the effects of changes in these laws on drinking and drug use behavior in the nlsy we find that repealing blue laws leads to an increase in drinking and drug use and that this increase is found only among the initially religious individuals who were affected by the blue laws the effect is economically significant for example the gap in heavy drinking between religious and nonreligious individuals falls by about half after the laws are repealed

characterizing the policy mix and its impact on eco innovation a patent analysis of energy efficient technologies abstract this paper provides an empirical investigation of the role played by selected characteristics of the policy mix in inducing innovation in energy efficiency technologies an original dataset covering 23 oecd countries over the period 1990 2010 combines the full set of policies in the energy efficiency domain for the residential sector with data on patents applied over the same period in this specific technological sector the econometric results suggest that when the policy mix is characterised by a more balanced use in demand pull and technology push instruments its positive effects on eco innovation tend to be greater moreover a more comprehensive policy mix is shown to be able to enhance innovation activities for the generation of new energy efficient technologies however the simple addition of an indiscriminate number of simultaneous policy instruments may reduce policy mix effectiveness finally the empirical findings confirm previous evidence on the importance of policy spillover effects and suggest that policy similarity between countries may represent an important aspect to be accounted for in policy mix design

energy efficiency economics and policy energy efficiency and conservation are major factors in the reduction of the environmental impact of the energy sector particularly with regard to climate change energy efficiency also contributes to reducing external dependence and vulnerabilities in the energy domain in this paper we discuss the factors that influence energy efficiency and conservation decisions and the most appropriate policies for their promotion although not all public policies seem justified we argue that specific policies for promoting energy conservation may be required preferably based on economic instruments or on the provision of information to consumers

electricity consumption in g7 countries a panel cointegration analysis of residential demand elasticities this article applies recently developed panel unit root and panel cointegration techniques to estimate the long run and short run income and price elasticities for residential demand for electricity in g7 countries the panel results indicate that in the long run residential demand for electricity is price elastic and income inelastic the study concludes that from an environmental perspective there is potential to use pricing policies in the g7 countries to curtail residential electricity demand and thus curb carbon emissions in the long run

durable goods and residential demand for energy and water evidence from a field trial this article describes a household production model in which energy efficient durable goods cost less to operate so households may use them more the model is estimated using household level data from a field trial in which participants received high efficiency clothes washers free of charge the estimation strategy exploits this quasi random replacement of washers to derive precise estimates of the household production technology and a demand function for clothes washing during the field trial households increased clothes washing on average by 5 6 after receiving a high efficiency washer implying a price elasticity of 06 the complete model is used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of recent changes in minimum efficiency standards for clothes washers

effects of feedback on residential electricity demand findings from a field trial in austria abstract this paper analyzes the effects of providing feedback on electricity consumption in a field trial involving more than 1500 households in linz austria about half of these households received feedback together with information about electricity saving measures pilot group while the remaining households served as a control group participation in the pilot group was random but households were able to choose between two types of feedback access to a web portal or written feedback by post results from cross section ols regression suggest that feedback provided to the pilot group corresponds with electricity savings of around 4 5 for the average household our results from quantile regressions imply that for households in the 30th to the 70th percentile of electricity consumption feedback on electricity consumption is statistically significant and effects are highest in absolute terms and as a share of electricity consumption for percentiles below or above this range feedback appears to have no effect finally controlling for a potential endogeneity bias induced by non random participation in the feedback type groups we find no difference in the effects of feedback provided via the web portal and by post

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

a marginal measure of energy efficiency the shadow value abstract economists are well aware of the importance of marginal versus average measures of energy efficiency yet in the energy literature there is no consensus on the appropriate method for defining and measuring energy efficiency this paper sets out the shadow value of energy as a proper and meaningful marginal energy efficiency index a restricted profit function is used to model the shadow value we explore four scenarios to characterize and evaluate the shadow value of energy a within country comparison of different production processes with different energy requirements a comparison of different countries with different resource endowment a government policy to impose a tax to alter the shadow value to address environmental issues and a within country comparison of externalities arising from two sources of energy a comparative static analysis is carried out to sign the functional arguments defined for the shadow value

residential electricity consumption in seattle abstract recent empirical research for different regions of the united states indicates that residential electricity may be an inferior good whose consumption is negatively correlated with income that is a provocative result that runs counter to what many earlier econometric studies indicate given that it makes sense to examine how electricity consumption behaves in different regional service areas even if residential electricity is an inferior good whose usage declines as income rises there is no guarantee that this will be the case across all service areas this study examines residential electricity consumption for seattle washington the largest metropolitan economy in the northwestern region of the united states results from a dynamic error correction modeling approach indicate that residential electricity consumption reacts in statistically significant manners to changes in real price real income and cold weather in the short run residential electricity is a normal good in this metropolitan economy in the long run residential electricity appears to be an inferior good in seattle all else equal whenever real per capita income growth exceeds 1 2 per capita residential electricity usage declines in seattle

frontier estimation and firm specific inefficiency measures in the presence of heteroscedasticity the purpose of this article is to illustrate a straightforward and useful method for addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in the estimation of frontiers a heteroscedastic cost frontier model is developed and estimated using bank cost data similar to that used by ferrier and lovell our results show dramatic changes in the estimated cost frontier and in the inefficiency measures when accounting for heteroscedasticity in the estimation process we find that the rankings of firms by their inefficiency measures is affected markedly by the correction for heteroscedasticity but not by alternative distributional assumptions about the one sided error term

impact of energy policy instruments on the estimated level of underlying energy efficiency in the eu residential sector the promotion of energy efficiency is seen as one of the top priorities of eu energy policy ec 2010 in order to design and implement effective energy policy instruments it is necessary to have information on energy demand price and income elasticities in addition to sound indicators of energy efficiency this research combines the approaches taken in energy demand modelling and frontier analysis in order to econometrically estimate the level of energy efficiency for the residential sector in the eu 27 member states for the period 1996 to 2009 the estimates for the energy efficiency confirm that the eu residential sector indeed holds a relatively high potential for energy savings from reduced inefficiency therefore despite the common objective to decrease wasteful energy consumption considerable variation in energy efficiency between the eu member states is established furthermore an attempt is made to evaluate the impact of energy efficiency measures undertaken in the eu residential sector by introducing an additional set of variables into the model and the results suggest that financial incentives and energy performance standards play an important role in promoting energy efficiency improvements whereas informative measures do not have a significant impact

measurement of energy efficiency based on economic foundations abstract energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity by almost all policy makers in practical energy policy analysis the typical indicator used as a proxy for energy efficiency is energy intensity however this simple indicator is not necessarily an accurate measure given changes in energy intensity are a function of changes in several factors as well as true energy efficiency hence it is difficult to make conclusions for energy policy based upon simple energy intensity measures related to this some published academic papers over the last few years have attempted to use empirical methods to measure the efficient use of energy based on the economic theory of production however these studies do not generally provide a systematic discussion of the theoretical basis nor the possible parametric empirical approaches that are available for estimating the level of energy efficiency the objective of this paper therefore is to sketch out and explain from an economic perspective the theoretical framework as well as the empirical methods for measuring the level of energy efficiency additionally in the second part of the paper some of the empirical studies that have attempted to measure energy efficiency using such an economics approach are summarized and discussed

biases in frontier estimation due to heteroscedasticity abstract this paper investigates the effects of heteroscedasticity on the parameters in frontier regression models a monte carlo experiment is employed to determine that heteroscedasticity leads to overestimation of the intercept and underestimation of the slope coefficients

models of technology diffusion abstract the literature on new technology diffusion is vast and it spills over many conventional disciplinary boundaries this paper surveys the literature by focusing on alternative explanations of the dominant stylized fact that the usage of new technologies over time typically follows an s curve the most commonly found model which is used to account for this model is the so called epidemic model which builds on the premise that what limits the speed of usage is the lack of information available about the new technology how to use it and what it does the leading alternate model is often called the probit model which follows from the premise that different firms with different goals and abilities are likely to want to adopt the new technology at different times in this model diffusion occurs as firms of different types gradually adopt it there are actually many ways to generate an s curve and the third class of models which we examine are models of density dependence popularized by population ecologists in these models the twin forces of legitimation and competition help to establish new technologies and then ultimately limit their take up finally we look at models in which the initial choice between different variants of the new technology affect the subsequent diffusion speed of the chosen technology such models often rely on information cascades which drive herd like adoption behaviour when a particular variant is finally selected

the devil is in the details household electricity saving behavior and the role of information abstract the purpose of this paper is to analyze swedish households willingness to increase their daily efforts to save electricity the analysis builds on a broad theoretical framework which embraces both economic and norm based motivations in explaining household behavior the paper pays particular attention to the role of information about the availability of different behavioral changes that can be undertaken at the household level the empirical results are based on a postal survey that was sent out to 1200 swedish households and the econometric analysis is carried out within a so called ordered probit framework our results indicate that costs environmental attitudes and social interactions are all important determinants of electricity saving activities within swedish households we tested the hypothesis that information about available savings measures that is presented in a more concrete and specific way is more likely to affect stated behavior than is more general information and the data collected support this notion the paper ends by discussing some implications of these results for the design of future informative policy measures in the energy efficiency field

estimation of a doubly heteroscedastic stochastic frontier cost function this article extends the results obtained by caudill ford and cropper in estimating and testing stochastic frontier cost functions in the presence of heteroscedastic inefficiency using cross section data it suggests the estimation of the model under the assumption of heteroscedasticity in both random terms this avoids any possible misspecification bias and the use of incorrect tests the same data as used by caudill et al supports the new specification moreover we find that firm specific inefficiency measures are extremely sensitive to the proposed correction for heteroscedasticity

the determinants and effects of health expenditure in developed countries previous studies of international differences in health spending have been restricted to the use of relatively small samples of cross sectional data our objective here is to re examine the results of previous work using a sample of 560 pooled time series and cross section observations results confirm the importance of gdp as a determinant of health spending with an estimated income elasticity at or around unity but also suggest that oecd countries should not be regarded as a single homogeneous group the importance of some non income variables is also confirmed although the direct effect of these factors appears to be small

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

the energy efficiency gap what does it mean abstract as renewed attention has been given by policy makers to energy conservation issues it has frequently been asserted that an energy efficiency gap exists between actual and optimal energy use the critical questions is how to define the optimal level of energy efficiency this paper seeks to disentangle some confusing strands of argument that are frequently brought to bear on this question by identifying the major conceptual issues that determine the set of feasible answers we identify five separate and distinct notions of optimality the economists economic potential the technologists economic potential hypothetical potential the narrow social optimum and the true social optimum each of these has associated with it a corresponding definition of the energy efficiency gap our analysis demonstrates that necessary preconditions for identifying the right measure of the energy efficiency gap include understanding and disentangling market failure and non market failure explanations for the gradual diffusion of energy efficient technologies

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

patent quality and research productivity measuring innovation with multiple indicators we analyse the determinants of the decline in research productivity using panel data on manufacturing firms in the us for the period 1980 93 we focus on three factors the level of demand the quality of patents and technological exhaustion we develop an index of patent quality using detailed patent information and show that using multiple indicators substantially reduces the measured variance in quality research productivity at the firm level is inversely related to patent quality and the level of demand as predicted by theory and patent quality is positively associated with the stock market value of firms

understanding the spectrum of residential energy consumption a quantile regression approach abstract residential energy consumption accounts for 22 of the total energy consumption in the us however the impacts of local planning policies such as increasing density and changing the housing type mix on residential energy consumption are not well understood using residential energy consumption survey data from the energy information administration quantile regression analysis was used to tease out the effects of various factors on entire distribution on the energy consumption spectrum instead of focusing on the conditional average results show that while housing size matters for space conditioning housing type has a more nuanced impact self reported neighborhood density does not seem to have any impact on energy use furthermore the effects of these factors at the tails of the energy use distribution are substantially different than the average in some cases differing by a factor of six some not all types of multifamily housing offer almost as much savings as reduction in housing area by 100 m 2 compared to single family houses

demand pull and technology push public support for eco innovation the case of the biofuels sector the purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand pull and technology push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector the empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database biopat containing patents in the field of biofuels selected using appropriate keywords and classified according to the technological content of the invention our results generally show that technological capabilities and environmental regulation spur innovative activities in the biofuels sector both demand pull and technology push factors are found to be important drivers of innovation in the biofuels sector however technology exploitation activities in first generation technologies are found to be mainly driven by quantity and price based demand pull policies on the contrary the pace of technology exploration efforts in advanced generation biofuels is shown to react positively to price based demand pull incentives but also to technology push policy the clear diversity in the impact of different public support instruments provides new insights which fuel discussion on the optimal policy mix debate and offers new elements for the design of future policy strategies