landlords versus tenants information asymmetry and mismatched preferences for home energy efficiency abstract new zealand homes are poorly insulated by international standards there are government subsidies available for people to improve the energy efficiency of their homes but uptake has been relatively low among owners of rental properties this paper presents the results of a choice experiment used to investigate the preferences of home owners and tenants for insulation and heating upgrades the responses indicate that landlords may underestimate how cold their rental properties are in winter considering the level of discomfort reported by tenants median willingness to pay wtp for improved insulation by landlords is only 50 70 of owner occupier values landlords are willing to pay more for a heating appliance than any other retrofit option in contrast tenants have a low wtp for the heating appliance and would prefer under floor insulation tenants express a willingness to pay higher rent in exchange for improved energy efficiency at a rate that would appear to make such upgrades economic for the landlord information asymmetry and lack of appropriate market signals may be a large part of the reason why many landlords are not willing to pay market prices for energy efficiency upgrades

household preferences of hybrid home heating systems a choice experiment application abstract the residential heating sector presents considerable energy savings potential as numerous heating solutions for reducing electricity consumption and utilizing renewable energy sources are available in the market the aim of this paper is to examine determinants of household heating system choices and to use this information for policy planning purposes this paper investigates residential homeowner attitudes regarding innovative hybrid home heating systems hhhs with choice experiment heating system scenarios are designed to represent the most relevant primary and supplementary heating alternatives currently available in finland the choice sets include six main heating alternatives district heat solid wood wood pellet electric storage heating ground heat pump and exhaust air heat pump that are described by five attributes supplementary heating systems investment costs operating costs comfort of use and environmental friendliness the results imply that hhhss generally appear to be accepted among households however several factors affect perceptions of these technologies the results reveal differing household attitudes toward the main heating alternatives and show that such views are affected by socio demographic characteristics age living environment education etc the results suggest that households view supplementary heating systems especially solar based favorably the other attributes studied also play a significant role in decision making

the excise tax effects of the property tax abstract this paper constructs a theory of how differences across regions in property tax rates affect product prices and factor prices for a model where labor and capital are perfectly mobile between regions it is shown that consumers residing in different regions face the same nontraded good prices even when property tax rates differ across regions

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

are environmental fiscal incentives effective in inducing energy saving renovations an econometric evaluation of the french energy tax credit abstract fiscal incentives have been introduced to encourage households in many countries to undertake energy saving renovations this paper assesses the impact of an energy tax credit on i renovation rate and ii renovation expenditures using french data we exploit a sharp discontinuity corresponding to the introduction of the french tax credit in 2005 to identify the policy s effects results indicate that the tax credit has little effect on the decision to renovate increasing renovations by 1 09 ceteris paribus we find that the presence of free riding reduces the actual effect of fiscal measures however this fiscal policy does lead to an increase in renovation expenditures by 21 76 all things being equal this suggests that the energy tax credit induces households who are already determined to renovate to perform more substantial energy saving renovations we conduct a robustness check using the matching method which confirms our results

optimal design for multinomial choice experiments abstract the author derives d optimal designs for main effects multinomial choice experiments using attribute levels as design parameters the design solutions are similar to standard main effects designs except that one attribute is used to manipulate response probabilities the manipulator is key to implementing optimal designs in practice

consumer demand for green power and energy efficiency abstract this article examines reported willingness to pay for electric utility investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency resources using the results of deliberative polls conducted by electric utilities in texas 1 age education and salary tend to affect reported willingness to pay for utility investments in these resources intensive exposure to information about energy resource issues led to an increase in the number of respondents interested in paying a modest premium to support investments in both renewable energy resources and energy efficiency however average reported premiums actually declined following the polls as very high outlier responses moved to more reasonable values following the polls these results support the contention that informed dialogue about energy alternatives will result in broader interest in providing a modest level of support for these resources

the incidence of regional taxes in a general equilibrium framework abstract a six region general equilibrium model of the united states is presented and used to evaluate the incidence of state local business taxes because this formulation allows for labor and capital mobility the provision of public goods distinctions between household and business level taxes and the interaction of state local and federal tax systems numerical analysis is particularly appropriate simulations show that capital improvements generally bear the average economy wide burden of business taxes levied on them regardless of whether a multilateral or unilateral policy change is considered or whether the alternative tax is imposed on immobile resources or household income however for other factors of production both mobile andimmobile the effects vary across scenarios a demonstration that incidence should not be thought of as a single outcome or value

empowered examining self disconnection in a postal survey of electricity prepayment meter consumers in new zealand abstract prepayment metering is an electricity payment method often used by low income consumers fuel poverty is an important public health problem in new zealand and is likely to be a particular problem for those using prepayment metering this paper details a nationwide postal survey of consumers undertaken with the support of three major electricity retailers which investigated the advantages and disadvantages of using prepayment metering from a consumer perspective the study surveyed a total pool of 359 randomly selected consumers across the three companies a response rate of 48 the study found that while almost all respondents felt the benefits of using prepayment outweighed the risks of running out of credit or self disconnection 53 of respondents experienced self disconnection in the past year of concern over a third of respondents experiencing self disconnection were without electricity for more than 12 h the frequency of self disconnection was also high with 17 of those disconnecting reporting six or more events in the past year government intervention could reduce the risks and disadvantages involved with using prepayment metering which could then support initiatives aimed at reducing fuel poverty

precautionary saving motives an assessment from uk time series of cross sections this paper gauges the strength of precautionary saving motives by estimating the coefficient of prudence from the u k family expenditure survey data set a time series of cross sections the instrumental variables estimates reveal that greater uncertainty systematically leads to larger current savings most of these impacts are large enough to be statistically consistent with widely accepted beliefs about attitudes towards risk so that precautionary saving behavior cannot be refuted moreover the households which are less likely to face liquidity constraints or to share risks are more sensitive to uncertainty finally the households for which the head works in the manufacturing industry are more inclined to self insure against uncertainty copyright 1996 by royal economic society

precautionary saving under liquidity constraints evidence from rural pakistan this paper investigates precautionary saving under liquidity constraints in pakistan using household panel data in particular while we estimates kimball s 1990 prudence parameter we deviate from dynan s 1993 framework by explicitly considering liquidity constraints as in zeldes 1989 by doing so we attempt to differentiate the standard precautionary saving caused by uncertainty from the one due to liquidity constraints furthermore endogenous liquidity constraints are considered to resolve issues of selection biases in this study we document substantial evidence of the presence of precautionary saving in pakistan more specifically the estimated prudence is significantly higher for liquidity constrained households as compared with unconstrained ones the results support the emerging view that facilitating saving may often be more important than finding better ways of lending to the poor

economic potential of energy efficient retrofitting in the swiss residential building sector the effects of policy instruments and energy price expectations the aim of this paper is to analyse the profitability of energy efficient retrofit investments in the swiss residential building sector from the house owner s perspective different energy price expectations policy instruments such as subsidies income tax deduction and a carbon tax as well as potential future cost degression of energy efficiency measures were taken into account the discounted cash flow method was used for the investment analysis of different retrofit packages applied to a model building scheduled for renovation i e a single family house constructed between 1948 and 1975 the results show that present swiss policy instruments push investments for energy efficient retrofitting to profitability cost degression has a minor significance for investment profitability however the most relevant factor for the investment analysis is the expected energy price expecting a future fuel oil price at the level of 2005 efficiency investments are close to profitability even without policy support if higher energy prices were expected energy efficient retrofitting would be an attractive investment opportunity

an analytical framework for joint vs separate decisions by couples in choice experiments the case of coastal water quality in tobago this paper offers an analytical framework for analyzing joint and separate decisions by couples in the context of choice experiments for nonmarket valuation it reports results from an attribute based stated preference study in which members of couples are asked to conduct a choice experiment first individually and then jointly the choice context was the selection of which beach to visit while on vacation in tobago available alternatives differed in attributes related to coastal water and beach quality such as level of coastal development and fish abundance tests of preference equality are reported and structured so as to identify the intra couple decision making patterns under taste heterogeneity with both finite and continuous mixed logit results from the latter suggest that women s preferences are found to be predominant in the joint choice experiment results suggest caution in using individual choice rather than joint couple choice when valuing quality changes impacting on couple activities such as water and beach quality in tobago and call for further research on the topic

labor mobility and the incidence of the residential property tax abstract this paper analyzes the incidence of the residential property tax in an economy with two communities workers are perfectly mobile so that their utility levels are equal in the two communities in equilibrium the property tax is modeled as an ad valorem tax on housing services

the degree of precautionary saving a reexamination abstract extending dynan s methodology dynan k 1993 how prudent are consumers journal of political economy 101 1104 1113 we show that a significant fraction of the prudence parameter puzzle can be explained by a downward omitted variable bias further the estimated prudence is substantially higher for liquidity constrained households

nonmarket institutions for credit and risk sharing in low income countries the design credit and risk institutions in low income countries provides one of the most exciting testing grounds for theories of contracting with imperfect information and limited enforcement this paper reviews some of the recent literature with a special focus on nonmarket institutions that cope with risk and provide credit this literature attempts to bring together insights from economic theory especially information economics contract theory and mechanism design theory however it is also applied being motivated by the circumstance of the poor countries that their authors have visited and studied

taxation and the tiebout model the differential effects of head taxes taxes on land rents and property taxes on the theory of state and local public finance is the seminal paper by charles tiebout 1956 tiebout constructed a multijurisdictional model in which independent local governments offer a wide variety of expenditure and tax policies and perfectly mobile consumers reveal their preferences for local public goods through their choice of residential community he argued that under such circumstances local public service provision would be efficient the tiebout model has formed the basis of a vast number of subsequent articles in the state and local public finance literature and has also been very influential in urban and regional economics the efficiency properties of various tiebout type models of local public good provision have been examined and the role of politics in these models has been debated at length in this literature of more direct relevance to this paper however is the fact that although tiebout had little to say directly about taxation simply assuming the existence of head taxes subsequent analyses have used adaptations of this model to examine the effects of local head taxes land taxes and property taxes it is the literature on the efficiency and distributional effects of alternative local taxes that is the subject of this survey 1

factors influencing willingness to pay for the energy star label abstract in the united states nearly 17 of greenhouse gas emissions come from residential energy use increases in energy efficiency for the residential sector can generate significant energy savings and emissions reductions consumer labels such as the us environmental protection agency s energy star promote conservation by providing consumers with information on energy usage for household appliances this study examines how the energy star label affects consumer preferences for refrigerators the results of an online survey of a national sample of adults suggest that consumers are on average willing to pay an extra 249 82 349 30 for a refrigerator that has been awarded the energy star label furthermore the results provide evidence that respondent willingness to pay was motivated by both private energy cost savings and public environmental benefits

who is credit constrained in the u s economy an important assumption of the life cycle model of consumption is the postulate of perfect capital markets this hypothesis has recently been challenged by substantial empirical evidence hall and mishkin 1982 using the panel study of income dynamics estimate that 20 percent of united states families are liquidity constrained mariger 1986 derives a life cycle model with endogenous liquidity constraints and using a cross section estimates this fraction to be 19 4 percent hubbard and judd 1986 simulate a model with a constraint on net worth which shows that with reasonable assumptions about preferences 19 0 percent of united states consumers are liquidity constrained the emerging consensus points therefore to a fraction of approximately 20 percent of the population behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the pure life cycle model in addition hayashi 1985 and zeldes 1989 investigate the correlation among consumption wealth and income for various population groups and infer that liquidity constraints are more important for younger families with low levels of wealth and saving the main limitation of these studies is that in their data sets constrained consumers are not observable and have to be identified via indirect evidence thus there is as yet little firm evidence about the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to be credit constrained this paper adopts an approach that differs from previous tests for liquidity constraints because it makes use of data where constrained consumers are observable and explicitly links their existence to credit market imperfections and personal characteristics the data drawn from the 1983 survey of consumer finances scf and described in section ii provide information on individuals whose request for credit has been rejected by financial intermediaries in section iii a model is developed in which consumers and lenders behavior jointly determines the probability that a consumer is rationed in the credit market this probability is then

the incidence of heterogeneous residential property taxes abstract in an economy with multiple tax jurisdictions the distribution of the burden of heterogeneous residential property taxes is shown to depend on the elasticity of demand for housing the elasticity of substitution between land and capital in housing production the elasticity of supply of land to individual tax jurisdictions and the degree of population mobility between tax jurisdictions it is demonstrated that the excise effects of the residential property tax may not cancel across jurisdictions and the average rate of tax may overstate or understate the burden on residential capital

consumption insurance an evaluation of risk bearing systems in low income economies the hypothesis of full risk sharing can be taken to data from low income countries and evaluate formal and informal financial systems in many contexts idiosyncratic risks are high so credit insurance arrangements could be beneficial statistical tests reveal that households in southern india take advantage of these possibilities villages in cote d ivoire and countries in thailand do not do as well the paper includes an empirical description of the devices used to smooth consumption and a theoretical discussion of private information and incentives on ideal operating systems the full information and mechanism design frameworks provide benchmarks for policy analysis

risk pooling precautionary saving and consumption growth in this paper we model the evolution of income risk and consumption growth we decompose the time series innovation of the income process into its common and cohort specific components from these we compute conditional variances which are used as separate risk terms in a consumption growth equation using a long series of british household data we exploit the time series variation to identify precautionary saving effects and find strong evidence of their importance specifically after allowing for demographic and labour market status there is an independent role for income risk in explaining consumption growth rather than the component that is common across cohorts however it is the cohort specific element that is important in determining changes in consumption growth this result points to a failure of between cohort insurance mechanisms

marginal costs and co benefits of energy efficiency investments the case of the swiss residential sector abstract key elements of present investment decision making regarding energy efficiency of new buildings and the refurbishment of existing buildings are the marginal costs of energy efficiency measures and incomplete knowledge of investors and architects about pricing co benefits and new technologies this paper reports on a recently completed empirical study for the swiss residential sector it empirically quantifies the marginal costs of energy efficiency investments i e additional insulation improved window systems ventilation and heating systems and architectural concepts for the private sector first results on the economic valuation of co benefits such as improved comfort of living improved indoor air quality better protection against external noise etc may amount to the same order of magnitude as the energy related benefits are given the cost benefit analysis includes newly developed technologies that show large variations in prices due to pioneer market pricing add on of learning costs and risk components of the installers based on new empirical data on the present cost situation and past techno economic progress the potential of future cost reduction was estimated applying the experience curve concept the paper shows for the first time co benefits and cost dynamics of energy efficiency investments of which decision makers in the real estate sector politics and administrations are scarcely aware

us consumers willingness to pay for green electricity abstract we analyze us consumers demand for environmental attributes of deregulated residential electricity services using results from a survey designed to elicit consumers willingness to pay for such attributes and using results from a hedonic analysis of actual price premiums charged for green electricity in several deregulated markets survey results suggest that many population segments are willing to pay for decreased air emissions even if there is no alteration in fuel source furthermore several groups are willing to pay significantly more when emissions reductions stem from increased reliance upon renewable fuels the hedonic analysis suggests that several product features not considered in the survey help explain real price premiums including fuel mix from newly created renewable generation capacity green e certification brand name and state of offer while survey and hedonic results are not easily compared due to limitations of the survey both point to similar values for key environmental attributes though the survey results are likely to overstate actual willingness to pay in sum the results suggest that consumer driven purchases can in part support the future of renewable generation capacity in the united states though reliance upon other policy alternatives may be needed if energy prices spike

property taxes and property values evidence from proposition 212 abstract we examine the effect of proposition 2 1 2 on revenues and housing prices in massachusetts communities that were initially constrained by the law saw large increases in state aid and the use of fees we use these initial constraints as instruments for changes in other components of revenue while treating the change in the property tax as exogenously determined by proposition 2 1 2 our results strongly suggest that communities that were able to increase their property taxes more rapidly saw greater increases in their housing values in the period following passage of the law

willingness to pay for energy saving measures in residential buildings this paper uses a choice experiment to evaluate the consumers willingness to pay for energy saving measures in switzerland s residential buildings these measures include air renewal ventilation systems and insulation of windows and facades two groups of respondents consisting respectively of 163 apartment tenants and 142 house owners were asked to choose between their housing status quo and each one of the several hypothetical situations with different attributes and prices the estimation method is based on a fixed effects logit model the results suggest that the benefits of the energy saving attributes are significantly valued by the consumers these benefits include both individual energy savings and environmental benefits as well as comfort benefits namely thermal comfort air quality and noise protection

the split incentives energy efficiency problem evidence of underinvestment by landlords abstract due to asymmetric information between landlords and renters landlords with tenants who pay the utility bill underinvest in energy efficiency measures using data from the 2009 residential energy consumption survey i present empirical evidence that this underinvestment occurs in multiple categories of residential energy efficiency space heating water heating window thickness insulation and weatherization because these landlords did not invest at the same rate as homeowners and landlords who pay the energy bill their tenants energy bill was higher by nearly 2 when combined with other researchers estimations for appliances davis 2010 insulation and thermostat responsiveness for tenants gillingham et al 2012 our results imply that renters use approximately 2 7 more energy overall due to the landlord tenant split incentive issue

how prudent are consumers using data from the consumer expenditure survey this paper presents a simple test that provides an explicit estimate of the parameter in the utility function that reflects the strength of the precautionary saving motive the coefficient of relative prudence the test yields a fairly precise estimate of a small precautionary motive in fact the estimate is too small to be consistent with widely accepted beliefs about risk aversion the presence of liquidity constrained households does not appear to explain this finding and there is some evidence that self selection of households into risky environments also cannot explain the results

passive house at the crossroads the past and the present of a voluntary standard that managed to bridge the energy efficiency gap abstract improving energy efficiency in dwellings is generally seen as the low hanging fruit of climate change mitigation in particular decreased heat loss through better insulation is suggested as one of the most cost effective means to achieve the ambitious national and international goals of climate gas reduction however the literature shows that a profitable technological solution is not sufficient to reach the energy goals aspects such as a lack of information unobserved costs and heterogeneity among users can compromise the success of technical innovation still there are successful concepts that drive the technological development in the construction sector the passive house is an example for such innovations that manage to bridge the energy efficiency gap this paper addresses the passive house concept and standard as a success story of technological innovation with bruno latour s science in action 1987 as a starting point we describe the conditions under which the standard was created the role of the network built around the passive house institute and the consequences of exporting the standard we identify success factors that have supported the diffusion of the passive house standard and concept and discuss its possible development in the current situation which is characterized by its wide spread adoption

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

risk aversion and willingness to pay for energy efficient systems in rental apartments abstract this paper uses a random utility model to estimate consumers valuation of energy efficient insulation and ventilation systems in rental apartments given consumers limited experience in residential buildings and the perceived uncertainty about their comfort benefits and resulting energy savings these relatively new technologies might be undervalued by risk averse consumers using the concept of certainty equivalence this paper proposes a model to assess the consumers risk aversion for adopting energy efficient systems these systems are treated as risky assets while conventional commodities are assumed to be risk free the curvature of the utility function is interpreted as a measure of aversion to perceived risks as opposed to explicit risks measured by observed variances the proposed formulation is applicable in stated preference data with qualitative variables the model is applied to data from a choice experiment conducted among 264 apartment tenants in switzerland the estimated curvatures reject the risk neutrality hypothesis the range of the estimated risk premiums suggests that risk considerations remain a central issue in dealing with energy efficiency in residential buildings the analysis also indicates that assuming same risk attitudes toward new and conventional systems could bias the estimates of the willingness to pay especially when the system is comprised of several components