Making Sense of Oil Stamp Saving Schemes

Philipp-Bastian Brutscher

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: An increasing number of households in Northern Ireland has started to collect oil stamps in recent years - i.e. small pieces of paper which can be purchased at specified outlets, collected on an oil stamps savings card, and used to pay in full or part for one's oil bill. In this paper, we explore why this is. After ruling out high costs associated with more conventional savings vehicles (such as bank accounts) and the notion that oil stamps serve some purpose other than saving for heating oil as possible explanations, we test two main hypotheses: i) oil stamps as 'self-control' mechanism and ii) oil stamps as 'other-control' mechanism. While we find little evidence for the first hypothesis, we do find evidence for the second one. More specifically, we find that collecting oil stamps is strongly correlated with differences in views among household members with regard to how much priority to give to saving for heating oil. To rule out 'salience effects' as an alternative explanation, we test whether oil stamps increase households' savings performance. We find that they do.

JEL-codes: D03 D04 D12 D14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/pub ... pe-pdfs/cwpe1203.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1203

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Dyer ().